Because social media accounts today expose our personal lives, a guy chose to share a very powerful story with the entire world so that others would not make the same mistake he did. His mother was in a nursing home when he abandoned her, and her dying request was for his son to improve the situation there since it was so terrible.
“After my father passed away, I believed that bringing my mother to the nursing home was the best course of action. I fully admit that I was self-centered because I didn’t want my life to depend on her, and I am very sorry for not giving her life or comfort even a moment of thought.
So when the day finally arrived and I learned that she wasn’t doing well, I hurried to the nursing home and was able to capture the farewell that I would have never imagined.
I asked her what else I could do to help her feel a little better since her gaze was growing smaller and smaller and I could feel a tear weeping in my spirit. She explained to me that the only reason she wanted to refresh that nursing home was because there were times when she was left without food because the refrigerators were malfunctioning, when she was unable to breathe in the heat and humidity because the fans had failed, and when she was unable to sleep because the springs slid in her back.
I felt the earth sliding from beneath my feet as I was hearing her words, and I couldn’t understand why she was just telling me this now, rather than when I might have done things for her sake. I also received a response that drastically transformed my life.
She warned me vehemently to take care with what I left behind and said that this is why she wants to modernize the nursing home because she feared that one day, perhaps, my children would abandon me there and I would experience what she did. Her final words were, “What you give is what you get.”