“My son, take care of your father when he is old; grieve him not as long as he lives.

Even if his mind fail, be considerate of him;

Revile him not all the days of his life;

Kindness to a father will not be forgotten.”

If you were asked the date of this instruction, what would you guess? You might possibly think it came from an advice book published in colonial America.

Actually, these words were written sometime before 180 B.C.E.by the Hebrew scholar Joshua Ben Sirach. His text was later translated into Greek by his grandson. It forms an honored part of the rabbinical tradition and is included in many Christian Bibles as well.

I heard Ben Sirach’s words in church on a recent Sunday. They seemed remarkably relevant to our own time.

The phrase “even if his mind fail,” which I knew well, struck me yet again by its immediacy. Of course, Sirach came many centuries too early to have heard of Alzheimer’s disease, but he appears to know of its destructive results.

That is especially surprising given that, centuries ago, people did not live nearly as long as we do. It would have been rare to find many men who had reached sixty or seventy.

Yet Ben Sirach presents the failure of brain power as typical or common to his society. It happened frequently enough that adult sons had to be exhorted to take care of fathers who had lost their mental capacities.

You can bet, however, that then as now, women did much, if not most, of the caregiving. Their place in society was strictly limited, to be sure, but I suspect their domestic responsibilities were considerable.

For this column I talked to a longtime friend, let’s call him Michael, who took care of his father during his last two years of life.  My friend moved his father into his own house and provided him with whatever he needed.

“It was always a challenge for me,” Michael says of the experience.  To explain what was difficult he speaks of  “a treasury of aggravation,” a phrase that suggests the challenges he faced.  He freely admits that his father was “not easy to deal with.”

Nonetheless, my friend was able to carry it off. And he now looks back on the experience and values it. He is glad to have risen to the occasion and provided his father with the things that made his last years bearable.

However, the enterprise would have been impossible without his wife. “What made it work was her marvelous help,” Michael says.

Also, on occasion, Michael’s brother would come from the Midwest to stay with their father and give his brother and sister-in-law some needed breaks.

At his father’s funeral Michael delivered a eulogy speaking freely about the challenges of his caretaking: “Dad was a man of strong emotion and strong impulses who was often at war with his better instincts.” Overall, however, Michael knew what he had done for his father.

The experience of one man, described here in brief, can represent what large numbers of men and women have had to do when their parents began to decline.  It is never easy, but caregiving in this situation can also prove one of the most significant events of one’s life.

The writer Mary Pipher says of her own parental care giving: “The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have wanted things to be different.”

On the human level, the experience of caring for one’s parents, with all of its trials, can carry with it great value. For believers, Joshua Ben Sirach’s promise of divine reward can be expected to yield even further benefits.