After two cancelled flights and a switch of airlines, I finally made it to Portland, where I’ve spent hours over several days with my mother in a rehabilitation facility. I sure wish I had the drive that she has, as she’s healing faster than anybody would have anticipated.

On the other hand, sometimes her strong will is  hard to deal with. Her health is now about where it was before the accident, except for the crack in her femur, but she’s much weaker. She’d greatly benefit from a longer stay in the rehab facility, where physical therapists can help strengthen her muscles twice a  day. She’s eligible for 100 days of such live-in care for free.  We’d like her to stay at least another week, both for her own strengthening and to give us time to make arrangements for when she comes home, which will likely include expensive in-home assistance with strangers entering her house. But she flatly refuses to stay in rehab past Wednesday.

Also she tells us day after day that she expects to die before morning, something she’s told us daily for a couple of years now. In fact, she wants my Sunday school class to pray for her to die. I told her that we wouldn’t pray for that, but we would pray that she discovers the reason why she’s been allowed to stay alive and in relatively good health (for a centenarian). So she stopped talking to me for a while.

It reminds me of a previous time with her in another emergency room. Her back was wracked with such pain that she could hardly sit, let alone walk. After giving the hospital staff her usual amount of grief, she eventually consented to an MRI. It showed that a couple of her vertebrae were cracked. “Let me go home!” she declared.

It was pointed out to her that she needed to spend some time in the hospital so they could help her heal .

“No,” she said, “Now that I know what it is, it won’t hurt so much.” And sure enough, she went home and it didn’t. And it healed.

How can one best care for such an erratic soul?