June 21, 2023
“If love transcends time and space, yet is present in time and space, there is no reason why deceased loved ones may not on occasion communicate in some way with those still living in historical time.”
– Mitch Finley
Every month Arlene called her caregiver Sandy to say she couldn’t pay her bills. They were going to turn off her phone. She already lost her cable service. And she was usually late paying her rent.
Sandy tried to help her the best she could, until the day she realized Arlene was using the money to buy scratch-off lottery tickets instead of paying her bills. She discovered very late that Arlene had a gambling addiction. Even worse, like most addicts, she denied that she had a problem. Whether it’s an addiction to alcohol, drugs or gambling, they call it the disease of denial. “I don’t have a problem” is uttered thousands of times a day.
In her last years, no one would answer Arlene’s phone calls because she was always asking people for money, and they knew where it went. Some family members tried to work around her problem and made sure the rent was paid and she had food to eat.
Sandy eventually got her into a nursing home because of her dementia. Arlene spent her last seven months in a hospital, and Sandy visited her regularly. She also made sure a priest went to give her the Sacrament of the Sick and absolution, because Arlene had fallen away from the faith.
Sandy didn’t celebrate Christmas that year because she was in the hospital beside Arlene’s bed. After her death, Sandy finally got around to opening her gifts and discovered someone had given her a scratch-off ticket. By her own admission she never “won anything in her life.” She took out a quarter and scratched off the numbers. Imagine her surprise to discover she won $100. The first word out of her mouth was “Arlene!”
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Always be open to the unexpected … and it will happen.
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