Keep the Kindness, Put Down the Worry

The line this site carries on everything: this is not medicine and nothing here is treatment. Whatever was handed down to you and whatever you are keeping, none of it replaces somebody qualified, and I am not going to tell you what to do for anybody's body.

What I want to do is help you sort a cupboard.

Because most of us inherited a whole way of behaving when somebody is ill, and it came from one person, and it is usually a grandmother. The window open or the window shut. What you do and do not say in front of the person. Whether you make a fuss or whether you carry on as normal. What gets made and brought upstairs.

None of that arrived as instructions. It arrived as atmosphere. You absorbed it before you could evaluate it, and now you are grown and you are doing some of it without knowing why, and a few bits of it you have started to suspect are not helping.

And the moment you think that, something in you flinches, because it feels like a criticism of somebody you loved.

Paul does this exact sorting

There is a line in the second letter to Timothy where Paul does something I have always found remarkable: he traces where a young man's faith actually came from, and he names the women.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

Which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois.

He is not being sentimental. He is being precise. He is saying: this specific good thing in you has a specific origin, and I can name her.

That is what it looks like to inherit something well. Not to take the whole cupboard without opening it, and not to throw the cupboard out. To be able to say what is in you, where it came from, and that it was genuinely good.

You have been given something real by somebody real, and God has never once needed you to be vague about where it came from. Second Timothy 1:5 names a grandmother out loud as the origin of something true, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person honor a person specifically rather than generally.

Kindness and fear travel together

Here is the thing that makes this hard, and it is not that some of it was bad.

It is that in most households the kindness and the fear are the same behavior.

She kept the window shut because she was frightened of a chill, and she sat with you for two hours while she did it. She would not let anybody say the word out loud, because in her family that word had come true, and the not saying it was how she protected everybody in the room. She made you the same thing every time because she needed something to do with her hands while she was terrified.

You cannot separate those cleanly, because they were never separate to her. The love was doing the fear's work and the fear was carried in an act of love. So the sorting is not: which of these were the good ones. It is: which of these do I keep doing, now that I know what they were for.

You are not betraying anybody by asking what a habit was for, and love has never once required you to inherit the fear that came with it. The written word says the faith dwelt first in Lois and Eunice and was passed on rather than imposed, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person keep the substance and set down the freight.

Nothing here is a recommendation

I have to be careful and I want to be plain about the shape of my care.

I am not going to tell you which of the things she did are worth keeping, in any practical sense. Not one. Nothing on this site names a remedy, and nothing here says whether something helps or harms a body, because I am not able to say that and because a page that starts making those calls has quietly become a clinic run by somebody unqualified.

What I will say is that anything at all in the practical column goes to somebody who trained for it. Second Timothy 1:5 hands on a faith and not a technique, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked a household to improvise medicine. If your grandmother did something and you have wondered about it, ask a pharmacist. They are free, they are qualified, and they will not laugh at you.

What is left, once the practical is handed over, is the part I actually care about: the sitting with, the not being alone, the warmth in the room. That part is yours to keep and it needs no permission from anybody.

You are keeping the part that was always the real inheritance, and none of that has ever once needed a qualification. Second Timothy 1:5 traces an inheritance of faith rather than of technique, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a practice from the love inside it without insulting either.

The one thing I will hand you that is not from her

Everything on this page has been about sorting through what a family handed down. This next part was not handed down by anybody. It is the plain routing that sits on every page of this site.

If something frightening is happening in the house right now, that is 911, and it is before you finish this page. If what is heavy tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a person picks up. And if somebody is unwell and the sorting has taken the place of the seeing, you ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today.

You are honoring her properly when you take somebody to the people who can do more. Second Timothy 1:5 has a faith carried down a family and arriving alive in a third generation rather than frozen in the first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a household keep moving without leaving anybody behind.

She would not have wanted her way of doing things to become the reason nobody called. I do not know her and I am confident of that anyway.

You have inherited a love that was always meant to end in somebody being cared for properly. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps affection from hardening into a rule, and what is written names two women as the beginning of something rather than as the whole of it.