A Life Well-Lived Provides Lessons
Grand Island Daily Independent
December 5, 2021
John A. Maisch, Guest Columnist
“Your mom is actively dying.”
The hospice nurse’s words were communicated in a professional and straight forward manner. But the pronouncement was not surprising to me or anyone else who knew the patient: Gloria Maisch did everything actively.
My mom had been slowly dying for nine years. Confined first to a wheelchair then to her bed, paralyzed by a devastating stroke that stole her memory and entire left-side, my mom’s eyes had closed for a final time several hours before the nurse’s visit.
Mom’s last evening was spent listening to her grandson provide an update on soccer practice that had occurred earlier that day, as he gently dabbed her forehead with a cool towel. Mom had taught my son much during these last nine years, lessons on fortitude, perseverance, and strength.
Mom’s progressively worsening condition over the past few years had prompted plenty of questions from my son: When we get old in Heaven, do we get to start over? Will you still be my parents in Heaven? Will we still live in our same house? But Mom’s nursing home was full of simpler teaching moments for a nine-year-old child, too.
My son witnessed how his grandma treated every certified nurse assistant the same, regardless of the color of the nurse’s skin or accent of the nurse’s voice. He saw how his grandma would reach out to hold the hand of another resident while their wheelchairs passed in the hallway and how a gentle touch could bring a small smile to a lonely person’s face.
Mom was full of lessons to be learned. Growing up in Grand Island, I watched her coordinate the delivery of Thanksgiving dinner to local shut-ins, meeting church members the night before in the church kitchen to begin preparing the meals.
I observed Mom help start Epsilon Sigma Alpha’s Holiday Tour of Homes, an annual event that, for over two decades, raised tens of thousands of dollars for the meaningful organizations such as the National Kidney Foundation and St. Jude’s Hospital. Everything she did was in service to others.
So, when I learned about the predatory beer sales in Whiteclay, Nebraska, back in October 2012, just a month after my mom suffered her stroke, I knew that I had to do something. That something involved directing and producing a documentary that would ultimately help lead to the closure of Whiteclay’s beer stores on April 30, 2017.
I would like to think my mom understood the magnitude of the undertaking and the improbability that her son and others would ultimately succeed in closing down those beer stores: The stories about my travels back to Nebraska, my battles with Whiteclay beer store owners, and my struggles before the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission. Regardless, her life’s work inspired me every step of the way.
My mom had moments of lucidness during her final nine years. Like in those early days after the stroke, when Mom lamented that she wished she could “pull the shade up, and it would be the way it was.” Or when she wished that she could “just go to Heaven, because it wasn’t good to linger.”
But even in the darkness of those last few years, Mom’s example showed through in others. “I think I’m lost,” my mom proclaimed during our last Christmas together. To which my son, having spent so much of his formative young life visiting his grandma, simply responded, “Grandma, you’re not lost, because you’re with us.”
On November 19, 2021, there was no more lingering. No more lessons to be taught. Only the memories of a life well lived.