I wrote this on another forum a while back:
My mother became a caregiver for an elderly sister in a neighboring congregation. She had gotten baptized at one of the giant conventions in NYC in the '50s that were always prominently featured in JW literature. She and her husband both got baptized there and they had a special-needs son. They put off having any other children until after Armageddon.
She was at various times a pioneer and was very well liked in the circuit. Even in her old age, her faith was palpable and she was a genuinely good person. She even had a picture on her mantle of one of her favorite young people, even though she had later "left the truth."
She had been a polio survivor and my mother got paid to spend something like 15 hours a week taking care of her, some kind of government program. By the time I met her, both her son and her husband were dead. She didn't have any close contacts with family because back then you had to cut ties with them if you wanted to be a Witness. She didn't need them. She had "the friends" at the kingdom hall. That's all she needed.
This sister's health started failing pretty quickly and she got to the point where she had to get around in a wheelchair. She required special assistance to get to the kingdom hall. The elders made a list and schedule of people whose responsibility it was to pick her up from her assisted care facility. Before long, the no-shows started happening. It would take her about 2 hours to get ready and she'd sit in front of the assisted living facility waiting for her ride that never came.
The elders finally gave up. It was too much of a burden on "the friends" to have to pick her up. So they started making her attend the meetings over the phone. This began to quite literally kill her slowly. All of the joy and light in her eyes went away. She was a shell of her former self.
About six months later she was moved to a full-on nursing home and she never attended another meeting after that. The elders were tired. The woman needed a lot of attention. She had no one other than the JWs, but the elders were already bogged down with all of the responsibilities and time constraints that come with it.
She died and there weren't very many people at her funeral. She was buried next to her husband. She gave her life to the organization and at the very end of her life, there was nobody there to repay her for her sacrifices.
To this day I still shed a tear when I think about her.
