Loving Your Older Neighbor

By Kaitlin Jandereski

There was nobody in the hallway. The long corridor stretched from one end of the hall to the other—clean and eternally verdant, except for a faint, irregular, white stain by Mr. Kuzmich’s door, as if someone had accidentally blotted a tube of toothpaste on it and dabbed it dry with a frumpy towel.

I twisted the golden knob to his door, sure he wouldn’t hear me if I knocked, even if I did so loudly. Mr. Kuzmich’s hearing was like an AM radio station, twirling around on a dancefloor of static, falling in step and out of step. On his bed, Mr. Kuzmich was sitting upright with his prickly gray, upside down mustache, cabbage green eyes and speckled brown jacket he thought was important to wear even while watching the Detroit Tigers on television.

He had a popcorn bag placed on his lap—the kind that people sometimes use to feed the ducks. His jaw moved up and down, up and down as he gnawed at the buttery kernels. I looked around the room, giving him time to move his jaw up and down, up and down. The air tasted dead, like a sniff of old tree bark. I hate the smell of nursing home rooms.

Mr. Kuzmich’s mustache latched itself onto his small lips as he smiled and said, “Sit down,” while he patted the Victorian blue seat next to his bed. I grabbed my pen from my purse and scooted myself closer to him so that we could write.

The big hand on the clock passed the twelve about three times before Mr. Kuzmich and I had finished writing. I slid my blotted black ink on yellow paper over to him. This was an activity we had made into a ritual the past few months, reading and writing and reading each others’ poetry to each other, but this time, he could barely read it. His eyes squinted at it like he was trying to catch the glimpse of a one-quarter moon against a cloudy background of a midnight black fog sky.

I could tell that he couldn’t read my words, which never used to be a problem for him, so I read it to him while he continued to lift pieces of popcorn up to his mouth. It was a half-and-half thing. One piece would reach his mouth, the other would drop through his fingers and onto his lap. Mr. Kuzmich never acknowledged that he kept dropping popcorn. It was as if it were the most natural and sensible thing in the world.

I left him with a goodbye hug. Two months later, while I was in Indiana for graduate school, I received a paperback book of poems in the mail. It was one of the poetry books Mr. Kuzmich and I used to read together—before we would start writing, before his eyesight went bad.

On the inside cover of the book, his wife had written me this note: “My husband is now with the Lord. I thought you might like this book of his. You two had some fond memories reading it together. If he were here right now, he’d ask when you’re coming over next and tell me to ask you to bring your pen, a pad of paper and your wildest imagination. I love you.”

Mr. Kuzmich was old and had trouble making sense of the words on paper. I was told that during his last few weeks on earth he needed an oxygen mask to breathe...yet I was still befuddled that he was not going to be in his nursing home bed, in all its dim light and stiff air, the next time I visited.

I cried a little that day.

Mr. Kuzmich had lived a lengthy life—one that sprinkled on a special joy that you or I could hear even in the silence. Like many elderly people, he had the type of stories you read in the historical textbooks, but his was a special edition that came with color and flavor, with details and conversations, with laughter and tears. He would share those stories with me and thank me each time for listening to him. “Nobody else will listen,” he’d always note at the end.

I never really could understand that last statement as I always thought that it was Mr. Kuzmich who should be the one receiving the thanks, so, in light of his life, I thought I should encourage you, as a young person, to go and talk to the elderly members in the Church’s body.

There certainly isn’t another Mr. Kuzmich out there, but there is a friend like him somewhere— one who may be a bit older than you, one who has quizzical joints and warm sweaters, one who will share his or her coffee with you, one who will tell you stories and write poetry with you, one who will tell you why he or she is Lutheran, one who will give you bendy straws to make a boring lunchtime meal enjoyable and one who will tell you that simple things like long laughs, a baby’s cuddle, and green grass gently flirting with the wind in the springtime next to a dairy farm are three of the best things in the world.

It might be scary to go up to him. She might not hear you the first two or three...or even five times you try conversation with her, but a friendship with her—made up of the old and the young, the experienced and the learning—is quite possibly one of the most rewarding friendships you’ll ever have. And for him, too. He’s most likely by himself. You have lots to learn and much beauty to see, and he can help you with that.

Love your older neighbors. Although their bodies are ailing and their minds are fading, they are in fact the most alive that they’ve ever been because they’ve never been more dependent on Christ than now, at the last moments of their life. And in you, they can see Christ working through others to bind up the broken-hearted and give kinship to the lonely. And, together, you both can rejoice in the eternal waters of your baptisms that poured from the font of Calvary when Christ died and rose again for you so that you would never die but would rise again with Him on the Last Day.

Kaitlin Jandereski is a deaconess student at Concordia Theological Seminary, and she’s from Bad Axe, Michigan. You may reach her at kaitlin.jandereski@ctsfw.edu.