I Have To Wash My Father

Nobody warned you about this part.

There are a hundred articles about carrying a parent's care. They talk about the paperwork and the tiredness and the difficulty of finding an hour. Not one of them describes standing in a bathroom with your own father and both of you looking at the wall.

There is a specific silence in that room. It is not unkind. Neither of you has any idea what to say, so nobody says anything, and it takes about eleven minutes, and afterward you both talk about something else with slightly too much energy.

And what you have not told anybody, because you cannot find the sentence, is that you sometimes cry in the hallway afterward, and that you do not know whether you are crying for him or for you.

What is actually being reversed

Let me name the size of it, because it is being treated as a chore and it is not one.

This man dressed you. That is a fact your body knows whether or not it has ever been put into words. There was a time when he was the one who managed your body and kept your dignity for you, and you had no idea it was happening because that is what a father does.

And now the direction has turned. That is not a task. That is the deepest reversal available in a human life, and it is happening in a small room with the extractor fan on.

You are living something enormous in a bathroom on a Tuesday, and the fact that nobody named it has never once made it small. Genesis 9:23 has two sons walking backward with a garment to cover their father, which is the written word treating this exact moment as sacred, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in a room where two people are looking at a wall.

And he is a whole man in there. He is not a task and he is not only a father. He is a man who was somebody's son, and who has his own reasons for how he handles it, and who is right about at least one thing you have never conceded to him.

He is also, almost certainly, more undone by it than you are, and has nowhere to put that either.

You are both carrying the same eleven minutes from opposite ends, and neither of you has ever once been failing at it. The Spirit of God is what holds two people in a room that has no vocabulary, and it is written in Genesis 9 that the covering was done with faces turned away.

They went backward, and covered him

And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. (Genesis 9:23, King James Version)

That is one of the most careful sentences in the book of Genesis, and the care is the point.

Noah is exposed. His sons handle it, and the text spends an entire verse describing how they did it: a garment across both shoulders, walking backward, faces turned away. Every detail is about preserving something that could not be preserved by pretending it was not happening.

They did not avoid the room. They went in, and they covered him, and they protected his dignity inside the doing of it.

You are doing exactly what those two men did, and covering a father has never once been the same as seeing him diminished. It is written in Genesis 9:23 that they went backward and their faces were backward, which is the written word making a whole verse out of how it is done, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies that carefulness in a bathroom without anybody having to think about it.

And notice that scripture does not treat this as beneath anybody. It does not skip it. It does not say the sons were embarrassed and the matter was handled. It records the covering as an honorable act, in detail, and it is the one thing in that chapter that is unambiguously good.

What you do in that room is not the unpleasant part of caring for your father. In the record God keeps, it is the honorable part.

You have been doing the honorable thing every single Tuesday, and no act of covering has ever once been counted as menial by God. The Spirit of God is the one who calls a thing what it actually is, and Genesis 9 gives an entire verse to the manner of it.

The hallway afterward

Now the part nobody helps with, which is what happens to you when the door closes.

The crying in the hallway is not a malfunction. Something enormous happens in that room every time and there is no ceremony for it, no words at the end, nobody to say well done. So it comes out afterward, in a corridor, at the first moment nobody is watching.

That is a body finishing something that had no ending.

You are permitted to come apart for two minutes in a hallway, and no amount of that has ever once meant you cannot do this. The Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person in a corridor with a stack of towels in their hands, and it is written that Shem and Japheth covered their father with a garment across both their shoulders.

And there is a practical thing that changes it, which is not about him at all. It is that you are doing every part of this alone.

Ask somebody for one thing. Not the bathroom. Something else entirely: a shop run, an hour on Thursday, a lift to an appointment. One specific thing, asked of one specific person, this week.

You are able to ask for one thing without handing over anything you want to keep, and one request has never once been the beginning of losing control of his care. The Spirit of God is what makes an ask possible for somebody who has stopped asking, and Genesis 9:23 puts the garment across two sets of shoulders and never across one.