About the Author:
Graeme Hunter is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, and a Research Professor at the Dominican University College in Ottawa. His recent books include Pascal the Philosopher: An Introduction (2014) and What Came to Mind: Essays against Fear (Justin Press, 2023). His philosophical interests are wide and range over Early modern Philosophy, Ancient and Medieval philosophy, Logic, and Ordinary Language Philosophy. This essay originally appeared in What Came to Mind: Essays Against Fear, and it is republished by kind permission of the author and of Justin Press.
My mother’s room is off the central corridor at the far end — the one with a view of the city through lacy Ash tree branches. That’s what I tell anyone who wants or needs to visit her at the old age home. Privately I think of her room as “the chute.” Friends, family, the staff of the home — let’s call it the world — are lowered in from the corridor. That is where the chute interfaces with ordinary life. And they’re hauled back up again afterwards. But some day, when earthly ministrations fail, her spirit will escape by the other route, through the window and away.
Meanwhile she waits with her few precious things, miraculous survivors of all her moves, of downsizing, of the unimaginable touch of time. We all know you can’t take goods with you when you die. In the opening scene of an old morality play, Death points his bony finger at Everyman. Property, wealth, family and friends back away. Only good deeds and knowledge will go with him on his final journey.
But you can’t take much to an old age home either. A few pictures. A small item of furniture perhaps. Your toothbrush. That’s about it. Old age homes are what Plato says philosophy is: preparation for dying. The fascinating thing is to see which possessions different people keep with them all the way to the finish line. You could never have predicted what it would be. Take the small wedge of wood with a polished lengthwise surface that sits on my mother’s night table for instance. (The night table is her only piece of furniture besides her bed and chair. All of them are institutional.) But the little piece of wood is hers. I often wonder what the attendants and caregivers, so few of whom have fluent English, make of the inscription on its gleaming surface:
“Be careful for nothing.”
I suspect it would puzzle most native English speakers as well. Especially these days. It’s the kind of thing I could use as a lesson for my philosophy students, on the difference between sentence words and sentence meaning. If you just relied on English grammar to decode it, “be careful for nothing” would come out as recommending needless vigilance. It would look like an injunction to take care for no reason. But it can’t be that, you say. Or can it? Perhaps it means that carefulness is such an important virtue that we should always be exercising it, even when nothing in particular seems to call for it.
Perhaps. And there was a time when such an exaggerated prudence might have pleased my mother. In those long-departed days of hectic responsibility, when she was a meticulous librarian, or, peering back farther, a teacher, a medical secretary, a mother of three. So long ago. High-octane carefulness might have seemed a desirable virtue then. But no more. Such a motto has no meaning once they put you in the chute. There you receive the care of others because you can no longer care for anything, even for yourself. Especially not for the whiffling activities of the world.
In the chute, you’re a total care-consumer. You have no care to give away. What use would be a motto asking for a lot of it?
Be careful for nothing. Couldn’t it also mean something more appropriate to her situation? We could read those words as meaning: give up caring! Don’t care about anything! That would fit my mother’s melancholy condition well enough. It’s just that it couldn’t be anyone’s motto. If you still are capable of having mottos, you still care, and they don’t put you into the chute. You only get 24/7 supervision when you don’t care, and you don’t care only because you can’t. Otherwise, they find another place for you.
So, what do her attendants and caregivers think, if they ever pause to notice the little wooden enigma? Readers (that dwindling tribe) would know that care did not always mean diligence or caution. In older English, carefulness had about it the idea of being burdened with responsibility, and carried a hint of anxiety, the worry that you would not prove equal to your task. Follow that line of thinking and you may crack the code. An even smaller group of readers, the ones who still read the Bible, may recognize the words. They belong to St. Paul. At Philippians 4:6, in the stately old King James translation, he tells us to “be careful for nothing”. Bible readers would also know what that means. It means to abandon your anxieties. All of them.
What better motto to place on a night table in the chute! In that shrunken world, on the threshold of eternity, there are many anxieties more than young people imagine. For their minds are still full of the lighter burdens they call cares. But the author of Ecclesiastes, known as the Preacher, tells us that in old age the whole world becomes to us a source of anxiety, and “the grasshopper is a burden.” Old people worry a lot about everything. Especially their sins, few and small though they often are.
On my last visit, my mother told me about some little petulance with one of the staff that was keeping her awake and unsettled. She wanted so much to feel forgiven. “Would you like to have confession,” I asked her uncertainly, because she was only lately received into the Church that provides this sacrament. Not until the age of 95 did she convert, and that after life-long hostility to Catholicism. I was still learning with wonder how thorough and deep her conversion had been. “Oh, confession would be wonderful,” she said.
I mentioned it to the chaplain when I saw him, and he was at once on his way. “Oh, blessed Church,” say I (who am also a recent convert).
“Be careful for nothing,” I tell my mother. “Casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you.” And that will be consolation enough for the time being. At some point her shriven spirit will go gently into that good night, out the chute, catching, perhaps, briefly in leafy branches, but soon on its upward journey “unto God who gave it.”
P.S. Her departure occurred on Nov. 14th, 2011. Two months short of her 100th birthday. Thanks be to God for his perfect care.
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