It went four a week, then two, then one a month, and then it went to nothing, and nobody ever decided any of it.
That is the part she keeps coming back to. There was no falling out. There was no day when somebody said, right, that is enough. It thinned, the way a path through a field thins when people stop walking it, one dry season at a time, and there was never a moment where anybody chose.
She has been here two years and four months.
The first winter there was a rota, and her daughter organized it, and she is a good woman and she meant every bit of it. Somebody came Tuesdays and somebody came Saturdays and there was a grandson who came on Thursdays for about eleven weeks and who she still asks about.
Then a baby was born. Then somebody moved. Then there was a period when everybody had that virus and nobody was allowed in, which was six weeks, and after six weeks a habit is gone and has to be started again rather than continued, and nobody started it again.
They are not bad people. She would say that first, before anything else, and she would mean it, and she would be right. They ring. Her daughter rings every week without fail and they talk for a good while and she looks forward to it.
She is eighty seven.
And here is what she said to the woman who does the tea, in April, and immediately wished she had not: "I have gone off the edge of everybody's week."
The woman said something kind. She always does. And it was not what she needed and there was no way for it to be.
What has been forming since is not resentment. She has not got the energy for resentment and she is not that kind of woman. It is quieter and it is worse. It is the sense of having been set down somewhere, gently, by people who love her, and of having gone out of mind, and of being a person who is now remembered rather than known.
You know that thinning. Yours may not be a care home; it may be a bad year or an illness or a move. But you know what it is to slip out of the front of everybody's mind without one single person doing anything wrong.
A remembering that does not run on a diary
Let me name the pit before we go to the book, because if this becomes a complaint about her family it will be a lie and she would say so.
The pit is not that they are cruel; they are not, and she knows the reasons for every single one of the gaps. The pit is what a person concludes after two years of thinning. Not that she is unloved. Something more exact and harder to say: that she has become a fact in other people's lives rather than a presence, and that the difference is permanent now, and that at eighty seven there is nothing to be done about it.
Here is the verse.
Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.Isaiah 49:15
Look at what God does with the word forget.
He does not pretend it never happens. That is the thing to notice, and it is why this verse is any use to a woman in a day room. He takes the strongest bond there is, the least forgettable relationship anybody could name, and He says plainly that even it is capable of failing. He does not tidy that away.
And then He puts Himself on the other side of it. Yet will I not forget thee.
I want to be careful with the first clause, because there is a careless way to read it and this article is not taking it. God is not making an accusation about anybody's mother and He is not inviting you to go looking through your own life for a case. He picks the highest bar in creation, in general, and then goes past it, and the sentence is about Him.
Here the line goes in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 49:15 is a comparison God chose to say something about His own remembering. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture reaches for a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.
And He says how it is kept.
Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:16
Cut in. On the hands. Not on a rota that somebody organizes in a good winter and that thins out when a baby is born and a virus goes round.
Take that in your chair, and know it is not me being soft with an old woman, it is what is written. You have not gone off the edge of God's week, and there is no rota anywhere in this. Isaiah 49:16 has a name cut into a palm, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that below the head into a woman who said something to the tea lady in April and wished she had not.
The path went. The well did not.
You are not being visited less by Him, and you were not quietly dropped off anybody's list where it counts. Isaiah 49:15 says they may forget, yet will I not forget thee, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that into a room where the chair by the window has not had anybody in it for a long time.
What thinned was a habit of visiting, and habits are made of Tuesdays and Saturdays and lifts and childcare, and they go the moment six weeks of a virus is put across them, and they do not describe what anybody feels. Your daughter rings every week without fail, and she does not do that out of duty, and you know the difference between the two after eighty seven years.
But that is not the whole answer either and I am not going to pretend it is, because the sentence in April was not really about visitors.
It was about being remembered rather than known. And there is nothing anybody in that family can do about that from four counties away, and I am not going to hand you a false hope about it.
So here is what is written, and it is the only thing large enough for what you actually said.
You are known, not remembered, and your name is cut into the hands of God where no habit reaches it. That is Isaiah 49:16, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a day room at eighty seven, and it does not thin, and it has not been getting less since the first winter.
And I want to say one more thing about the grandson who came for eleven weeks on a Thursday, because you still ask about him.
He was nineteen, or thereabouts, and he came eleven times, and eleven times is a great deal for a boy that age. That was not a rota. That was somebody who wanted to.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in your own chair. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over two years of thinning is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on anybody visiting more often, and they may not. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by any rota. What happens with your family, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Conclusion I have come to in this chair, that I am remembered now and not known, you are not what God has done with my name, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 49:16 says He has graven me on the palms of His hands, and no habit anywhere reaches that.
- Sentence I said to the tea lady in April, that I have gone off the edge of everybody's week, you have no place in this room. It is written that they may forget, yet will He not forget thee, and His Spirit is the one who holds that, and it has not been getting less since the first winter.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female and You have cut my name into Your hands. I have written it on my own palm and read it out loud over the top, and the path going does not mean the well went with it.
Isaiah 49:15
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