There was no car - only a dirt path, then a longer road, then a state transport bus station, and a father who walked every step of it with his son, every single year. He was not a man who cried. And yet every year, at the moment of goodbye, he wept - hugging his grandchildren as though he wouldn't see them again, pressing a five-rupee note into a small hand, then standing in the dust long after the bus had disappeared over the horizon, his hand still raised.
Dr. Ezekiel Christian did not understand what he was watching until his father was already dying of dementia and depression - and realized, too late, that those yearly farewells had been the earliest signs of a decline no one had caught in time.
*Honor Them Still* is both a confession and a companion. Drawn from the author's own family alongside thirty-five years treating the elderly across India and Canada - park benches where lonely widowers feed ducks rather than go home, hospital rooms where "failure to thrive" is often a euphemism for abandonment, and immigrant households where parents are materially secure but relationally starved - this book names a pattern the author calls hidden torture: love that quietly curdles into management, presence that shrinks to accommodation.
With unflinching honesty, Reformed theological reflection, and a haunting original poem, *Honor Them Still* offers no easy comfort - only a harder, more urgent truth: honor is a verb, not a sentiment, and for those whose parents are still living, it is not yet too late to practice it.
For readers of Christian caregiving literature, medical humanities, and diaspora family stories - a book to read before the bus pulls away for the last time.
