and in praise of my mother-in-law

One of my mother-in-law’s special qualities, and she has many, is that she always says thank you. She’s ninety-four and needs a fair amount of assistance. People are more than willing to offer it, because she never fails to express her appreciation. She even thanked me for being a really good son-in-law, which I have done little to deserve. She should thank my wife, who truly is an excellent daughter, as is her sister, as are her brothers who are brilliant sons. But then she does thank them, and her carers, all the time, for every small act. That’s what I call gracious living, more so by far than sipping champagne over breakfast at some tropical waterfront hotel. Judaism has a phrase for it, hakarat hatov, acknowledging what’s good, honouring life’s blessings and never taking them for granted, however ordinary they might appear.

Anyway, enough of generalities. This morning we took my mother-in-law to the park. I kept having to redirect her wheelchair and point it in the right direction, because my wife kept saying, ‘Look! Look at that camelia, with the pale stripes on its red flowers. Look at that white one!’ ‘Beautiful,’ said my mother-in-law. ‘See those buds on the Judas tree (Crown of the Forest it’s called in Hebrew, a far nicer name.) Another week, and it’ll be covered in purple blossom.’ ‘Beautiful,’ said my mother-in-law. ‘Look there at those violets,’ I said, sensing it was my turn.’ ‘Wonderful,’ said my-mother-in-law. In case you form the impression that some kind of memory loss has reduced her vocabulary to this small range of generous adjectives, you would be totally mistaken. She’s as astute and attentive as ever, apt to pick up other people’s entire life-stories in a tenth of the time it would take most of us, and as interested in life, and every small detail of what her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren do, as ever.

I mention all this not only because I deeply admire my mother-in-law’s capacity always to see the good. (When she and my father-in-law had a serious car accident on the way from the airport up to Jerusalem and her visit to Israel was reduced to a month in the Hadassah Hospital, she observed that she had been enabled to see sides of the country which few others had.)

I reference this also because last Shabbat we read the Song of Songs. That most wonderful of love poems is about noticing, the lily among the thorns, the deer hiding behind the latticework, the half open blossom on the nut trees, the tiny embryo figs on the branch. The world, through the eyes of young love, is beautiful, gorgeous, entrancing. And why should we forget that, even when we grow old?

Last week I was on a panel at the amazing ChangeNOW climate and nature conference in Paris. There were three of us faith leaders, together with Karenna Gore and Satish Kumar. Satish made the whole crowd rise and sing with him ‘The world is beautiful. There is beauty around me, beauty above me, beauty behind me…’ I admit to reflecting that this simply isn’t true. Just think of the wars, the bombs, the killings, the vast devastation. But then, if we remember that the world truly is in essence beautiful, we may take more deeply to heart what it means to destroy life, the wounds we cause, the ruin we leave in our wake, and vow even more earnestly to do our utmost never to let this happen again.

So I try to take a leaf out of my mother-in-law’s book, or rather I should say, garden. I try to notice and appreciate more. I admit that when I set off down the road in the morning, I say hello to the animals. ‘Morning, blackbird.’ ‘How are you doing, magpie?’ I start my day by filling their feeders; I would hate to know that they could find no breakfast after singing their salutations to the dawn. If other people think that I’ve lost it, so what? Most of them won’t hear anyway; they’ve got devices plugged into their ears. I say a quiet ‘good morning’ to the people I pass too. Most of them look straight ahead, unheeding. Others probably think I’m weird; this isn’t how Londoners behave.

But why shouldn’t I be grateful for the birds, or for God, or the spirit, or life, or whatever, that has made us, humans, crows, foxes, dogs, goldfinches, companions? If I notice the birds with appreciation, maybe they’ll notice me with something other than visceral fear. Maybe they, in their own way, are saying ‘Thank you; good to be together on this earth.’

‘Look over there at those grape hyacinths,’ says my wife. ‘I love those ones with the darker blue below.’ I turn the wheelchair to face the right direction. ‘Wonderful,’ says my mother-in-law.