We met up at Dad’s house like he asked. My sister drove down from Atlanta. I drove up from up from Pine Mountain. It was a dreadful ride for me. My anxiety was high. It was going to be a hard day.

As I drove along Hwy 18 toward home, the miles of barbed wire fence, pasture, and old barns stirred my memories of a time when everything felt right. Mom and Dad made a good life for us. The house was full of laughter. There were chores to be done. Cows to feed. Supper was at 6pm every evening.

No one wants the hard days to come. What we want is for life to go along without any bumps in the road. We want everyone in the family to be healthy, or to be responsible, or to make good decisions in life. If we could arrange it, everything would always go along without a hitch to the very end.

But that’s not how life works. A loved one gets sick. Somebody’s life goes off the rails. Unexpected circumstances shake the ground under your feet. And inevitably, there’s a hard decision that has to be made that no one really wants to make.

Dad called us home because he had made what, I think, must have been the hardest decision of his life.

None of us really know for how many years Dad had recognized that Mama was slipping away from him. I’m sure he saw the signs way before any of us. The lost words. The confused look in her eyes. The nearly imperceptible adjustments in routine that only he would notice.

The thing about the really hard decisions in life is, more often than not, they don’t sneak up on us. We see them coming from a distance. What we fear we might have to do appears on the horizon like a truck on one of those long, straight highways out west where you can see for miles and miles. Just a dot out there in the distance.

You say to yourself, “I don’t have to deal with that decision right now. I might not have to deal with it at all. Heck, that truck might turn off the highway and go some other direction. Who knows, maybe it’s an illusion, like a mirage. If I wait it out, the situation could change. Maybe life will correct itself. Maybe the hard thing will just go away, and I won’t have to face it.”

I am at a point in life where I have had to face some of my own hard decisions. And in those times, I have tried to put myself in Dad’s shoes. I have longed for a connection that would show me how he navigated those final and grueling years with Mama. What did he think about when he laid down at night next to her? How many sleepless hours? How much did he wrestle with himself before he actually did the hard thing?

You see, the hard decisions in life make you question yourself, especially when it’s about someone you love. The relationship changes. The other person is impacted by what you decide. That kind of responsibility burrows itself into the soul of the decision maker. I have no doubt that he asked himself a thousand questions.

Have I done all I can do?

Will she think that I don’t love her anymore?

Will the kids understand how difficult this is?

How will I bear the shame if this doesn’t work out?

What if everyone thinks that I’m the one who failed her?

I know he sought advice. There are always others who have had to make similar decisions. He even asked me for advice, a son who had never faced any situation like this with such deep consequences.

“What do you think I should do?” he asked.

I remember his furrowed brow, his blue eyes full of water. There was no way I could grasp the gravity of what he was asking. Oh, I told him that I though he was doing the only thing he could do. I reassured him that I understood that he wasn’t giving up on her. I knew he loved her. But her dementia was overwhelming him, and he had run out of options.

No matter how much advice a man gets, the decision is still his to make. No one can make it for him. And the weight of some decisions is almost unbearable.

I know that Dad was a man of strong faith. Praying over decisions like this is the natural response of a believer. We go to the One who sees all and knows all, looking for clarity, looking for peace, looking for answers. And so we should. But God never makes the decision for us. He prods. He nudges. He leaves us with a sense of what we know we have to do, but when it comes down to it, the decision is ours to make. We make it, and all we can do is trust Him to see it through.

So, when he called us and told us that he had decided to take Mama to the assisted living facility at Mount Carmel, my sister and I drove to the house so he wouldn’t have to make that trip alone.

For the most part, it was a quiet ride through the back roads to Mount Carmel. Mama was confused about what was happening. From time to time she would say, “Take me home. I want to go home.” But we all knew she was thinking of her childhood home, because lately that was where her mind had settled. Her reality was the life she lived in the 1920s and 30s.

When you make a decision for yourself, hard as it sometimes may be, you work through it and you come to terms with it. But when you make a decision that puts someone you love in a situation they don’t understand there’s a knife that cuts to the heart in a way that no one can comprehend unless they’ve been there.

In the end, Dad’s decision proved to be the right one. I think he came to terms with that. Though he gave her care to someone else, he remained devoted to her in every way possible. Even when she forgot who he was, there was never a day when he forgot her.

I’m writing this because I know what the hard decisions are like for you. The decisions you make in a hospital room. The decisions you make about the children you raise. The decisions you make about a broken trust between friends. The decisions you make about a marriage gone wrong. Every day hard decisions are being made.

It’s a lonely business imagining the consequences that we can’t see, second guessing how life will play out. But we do the best we can with the circumstances dealt to us.

I stood by Dad in his decision. I am blessed to have people in my life who stand by me. I have no reason to feel that I am alone in the hard decisions of my life.

Neither do you.