An Eulogy

There was once, at the infamous elderly daycare, a 102-year-old man named Kelsoe.

All of my stories about him are secondhand because he had advanced Alzheimer's and I never made it up to the second floor where those guys did therapy until late July. By then Kelsoe was out sick with a cold and, to my knowledge, did not come back. But every student who went upstairs before then came back down talking about him.

Kelsoe, you see, was stone deaf, but this did not prevent him from having an excellent sense of humor. Mornings in the Alzheimer's room were made all the livelier as a volunteer screamed instructions directly in his ear. He cracked jokes; they all laughed. He couldn't tell you what year it was but he was still brimming with wisecracks and punch lines.

I know it might seem strange to write a eulogy for someone I didn't meet, but Kelsoe intrigues me. He was in a wheelchair. Alzheimer's had robbed him of much. He probably wouldn't notice the roar of a jet engine if he were sitting on the runway. He was someone who society would have written off years ago.

"He had a good life," they would say.
"It's a shame to see him like this," they would say.
"He wouldn't want to live this way," they would say.

I assume they'd say these things, anyway, because people certainly said them about my grandmother, who passed from Alzheimer's around the same time that Kelsoe did. They're not untrue and I dearly wish I'd known both of them in their primes. I know there are sides of them that, at this stage in their lives, were gone forever but added so much to who they were.

But people talked about Kelsoe all week, guys. They would meet him on Monday or Tuesday and then he'd come up again in a Friday debrief as the person who'd impacted one of my students the most of anyone they encountered. Did Kelsoe remember any of them after they left the daycare? Doubtful. But I can tell you of nearly a dozen people whose lives changed a little bit because of him. Wheelchair-bound, forgetful, deaf Kelsoe.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you are still alive on God's green earth, it's because He is still using you, whether you are aware or not. He's using you mightily. And usually, you contribute very little to the results.

Kelsoe's just my case in point.