On the journey with Hilda

One Sunday, 15 years ago, she drove up in her little red car, walked through our doors, and introduced herself. “My name is Hilda. I’m an 85-year-old widow looking for a church home.”

It was impossible not to like her. She had a spring in her step, her smile was magnetic and open, and she always looked into your eyes when she spoke to you.

She told me she was going back to her roots. The church at which she’d been an active member for half a century had split and then disintegrated around her.

Her father had been a Mennonite pastor. “Are you the pastor? And you’re Mennonites, right?”

“Well . . . uh . . . yes. Maybe not the way you remember, but yes—.”

The ambivalent answer didn’t seem to put her off. The answer was “yes” and she settled in. She took the membership classes; we became her church home.

Mind you, the music was usually a little loud for her taste, but that’s when hearing aids do their best work, right? And the songs – she didn’t know some of them but that’s what overheads are for, right? She did miss the hymnal but being able to look up and see the words, there was sense to that.

But when we sang “Count Your Blessings” or “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” her face lit up the sanctuary. The worship leaders knew when they had hit a good song and cherished the prize.

As a Mennonite pastor in the lineage of her father I was put on a pedestal. I reminded her of her father, she told me, and he had been a saint. (It must have been a peculiar line of saintly pastors.) Somehow in her memory I had a ponytail in those early days, but that didn’t bother her. God had told her it was okay and that settled it.

Every week she squeezed my hand at the door and said something kind. She couldn’t wait to come to church on Sunday. She told me she carried my family when sleep didn’t come. Praying was what she did and her prayers carried us through some dark valleys.

When she turned 90, the church put on a birthday party. “We’ll do this again when you turn 100,” we cheerfully declared to her and to each other, not really knowing what that meant.

We did travel the road to 100 with her. I remember her sadness as she gave up her driver’s license. Now she felt old, for her car was her freedom. She was dependent on others in a way she had never been before.

Not long afterwards she moved from her neat mobile home with its garden to a community living apartment. We came to visit her and were even guests for lunch. “This place must be a preview of heaven,” she declared. “Can you imagine having a beautiful apartment and then being able to go down for lunch and supper served by such polite young people?”

Not everyone at the table had such a gracious view of life. “They’re complainers,” she whispered to me apologetically.

She rarely complained but we never had the sense she was glossing over her pain either. “You know, there are times when getting old is very hard,” she told me one Sunday. “All my life I’ve been praying for others but the other day I prayed for strength and my prayers didn’t get through. I learned something: when you can’t pray, others have to do it for you. I never knew that before. It felt very strange.”

What do you say to that, in the 30 seconds you have before the service starts?

Not long afterwards, her community living situation couldn’t do the job any more and an extended care facility became her new home. This too was viewed as a gift from heaven to her. The nicest people in the city looked after her. They helped her out of bed. They helped her dress. They wheeled her into the dining room and then back.

When visitors came and a voice or a face sparked a memory, that same smile would light up the room. She would reach out her hand and say, “You know. . . .”

Last week I went to see her for what I suspected would be the last time. She smiled and reached out her hand and began to say something familiar but the words and thoughts passed each other so she just smiled her signature smile.

Today we’re completing our journey with her. She’s gone already, of course, but we’re going to linger a while at the door where we first met her. We know that this time she’s really found home.

James Toews is pastor at Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C.