FOODFORTHOUGHT

Robertson and Muriel McQuilkin were married for 55 years. They had a wonderful life together. He was a minister and president of a seminary; she was an artist, counselor and teacher. Then, in l979, Alzheimer’s began taking hold of Muriel. As the disease progressed, Robertson resigned from the seminary in order to care for Muriel full time.

As he cared for his wife, McQuilkin chronicled this last chapter of their life together in three articles published in the magazine Christianity Today. The articles are real, but touching reflections on the mystery of love and marriage.

To those well meaning friends who wondered how he could walk away from the work he loved, who urged him to accept his wife’s fate and move on with his own life, Robertson responds:

“When the time came to resign, the decision was firm. It took no great calculation. It was a matter of integrity. Had I not promised 42 years before ‘in sickness and in health…’til death do us part?’ This was no grim duty to which I was stoically resigned. It was only fair. Now it was my turn. And such a partner she was!

If I took care of her for 40 years, I would never be out of her debt.”

“She is a delight to me. I don’t have to care for her, I get to. One blessing is the way she is teaching me so much about love, for example, God’s love. I’ve learned to ‘go with the flow’ and not correct irrational behavior…memories help, too. Muriel stocked the cupboard of my mind with best of them. I often relive a special moment of love she planned or laugh at some remembered outburst of her irrepressible approach to life.

Sometimes the happy doesn’t bubble up with joy but rains down gently with tears.”

“As I watch her brave descent into oblivion, Muriel is the joy of my life. Daily I discern new manifestations of the kind of person she is, the wife I’ve always loved. I also see fresh manifestations of God’s love, the God I long to love more fully.

“We trusted in the Lord to work a miracle in Muriel if He so desired, or work a miracle in me if He did not.”

There are many stories like the McQuilkins, stories of such devoted love and faithfulness here in our own parish, in our own community. Their quiet lives teach us what it means to be a disciple of the Gospel of Jesus whose entire life is a parable of humble and selfless service to others. Jesus, who welcomed to His side the rejected and scorned of society, who washed the feet of His friends and taught them to do the same, leaves the legacy of such “greatness” to us, His Church.