As a college writing teacher, my students were required to write essays that would answer the question: Is it ever okay to lie?
Paper
after paper my students would write "Yes" and go on to support their
answers. I knew many people who lied regularly. But it was unusual for
me to listen to somebody defend their lying.
The situation was
often this: The student would have an elderly parent or grandparent who
lived far away. Very far away. Say, for example, the student lived in
New York and the elderly grandparent was living in China. The student's
father was ill and nobody would tell the elderly grandparent back in the
homeland. Their reasoning was this: That it would upset the grandparent
so it was better to say nothing. I always just focused on the students'
writing, their development of ideas, sentence structure and grammar,
but inside I was kind of horrified. How could you not tell a grandparent that their son was sick? Or dying? Or dead?
Recently
I've started lying to my mom. It just happens. She's elderly and has
dementia. So when my husband came home from a business trip with a
broken leg, did I tell her? Absolutely - NOT.
Last month I
detected a large lump on the back of my head. To the doctor and hospital
I went. Did I tell my mom? Absolutely - NOT. The lump thankfully turned
out to be just a fatty deposit.
Sometimes I have to get my mom up
and walking. She'll stay in bed all day until dinner unless somebody
gets her up and walking. I'll call her around noon or 1pm and tell her
it's time to take a walk down the hall. She'll ask, "Can I go back to
bed after this?" I answer, "Absolutely!" Then in an hour I'll tell her
that her aid is coming. I don't mention that her aid will be getting her
onto the exercise bicycle.
Last week her home health aid texted
me that my mom didn't want to do a certain activity. She texted me, "I
hate to lie to her but sometimes I just have to, to get her there." To
the home health aid I wrote, "You're not lying. You are honest when you
say, "Yes, you can go back to sleep after this. You're just not telling her that she cannot go back to sleep right after this.""
It's
disturbing to not tell the truth, or to withhold the truth. It's a line
to be very very careful about. I have to decide in each and every case.
But it does feel right to not worry somebody who, as
part of her medical condition, lacks initiative and needs a little
'help' to get moving. I know what the consequences would be of my mom
laying in bed all morning and afternoon. They would not be good.
With my husband's broken leg, what I don't
want to have happen is for my mom to feel that she's burdening me with
taking care of her, on top of taking care of my husband. That could
really be bad.
Maybe there's somebody around and my mom will ask,
"Have I ever met her (or him) before?" There was a time when - without
hesitation - I would say "Yes." But now I hedge. "I don't think so," and
she'll feel better. It's hard enough for her - she knows, she really
really knows, that her memory is failing. Badly. But I'm not going to
rub it in and feel unnecessarily badly about her condition.
Okay, let's not call it a lie. Maybe let's call it less than truth.
The
last time I drove home from visiting her, a 7-hour drive mostly in the
dark, she wanted me to call her when I got home. It was getting really
late. Really late. Like middle of the night late. There was no way I was
going to phone her at 3am. I considered lying and telling her I had
arrived home, safely. NO I couldn't do that. What if something actually
happened to me on the road after I phoned her? Next idea: I might make
her angry, but the call went something like this: "Mom, it's getting
late and I'm not home yet but I'm only an hour away from home. I'm not
going to call you again because it's just getting too late." And she
said, "That's fine, dear. Thank you and drive safely."
My
religious tradition says one may lie to preserve the cause of peace, not
to hurt another person’s feelings, or to provide comfort. One may also
lie in a situation where honesty might cause oneself or another person
harm.
Honestly, it's not always so easy to tell what that line is.
And dealing with aging parents is difficult enough. Maybe some of my
students had this right all along.
