My children are good people. This means more to me today than when I was busy raising them and worrying about rings, report cards and whether they ate enough vegetables. Michael works in Denver, where the mountains appear in his photographs as an engaged background. Anne lives in North Carolina and worries in an organized and efficient manner, which is more like my mother than she knows. They call often. They send out groceries when I forget to order them, and links to shoes they think provide better arch support. They come by plane when they can. They don’t neglect me. But every time they came during those years, they would say a version of the same thing: “Mom,you don’t have to do this alone. “
And they were right, in a sense.
There were personal assistance establishments. There were waiting lists, home care assistants, and brochures with smiling women doing chair yoga under skylights. There were meals delivered in sealed containers, transportation services, and activity calendars printed with happy fonts. There were systems. There was help. There were people who would have taken perfect care of her in a practical sense.
But this phrase –You don’t have to do this alone – never quite touched the deeper truth. I wasn’t caring for a patient who was lucky enough to have my blood. I took care of the woman who taught me how to tie my shoes, how to make a sauce without lumps, how to continue after a disappointment, and how to sit next to the sorrow without trying to put it away too quickly. At some point, duty and affection ceased to be two separate things. There was no clear line where obligation stopped and love began. There was only the daily decision to stay.
The hardest part was never the physical labor. People assume so. They imagine getting up, bathing, laundry, medication schedules, doctor’s appointments, interrupted sleep. These things are real, exhausting, and often enough to make you scream in pain down your spine. But the hardest part was watching his world shrink.
At first it happened so gradually that I was able to pretend it was just an inconvenience. Her eyesight has diminished until she only sees outlines unless the room is very bright. She still recognized my face, but when I entered from a gray area, she hesitated for half a second before recognition came. Her hearing dropped in places, meaning she could hear a fork falling in the kitchen, but not always hear me talking to her about the weather. She stopped driving long before that, then stopped asking to go to certain places because the church steps were tiring her, crowds were disturbing her, and neon lights were giving her a headache. The friends of the church are dead. His last living sister is dead.The neighbor who was stopping by for coffee moved to her daughter’s house in Kentucky. One by one, the names disappeared from the phone book she kept near the wall. Addresses have become obsolete. Christmas cards have stopped coming. The world cleared up around her, and I could see her trying to be brave while it happened.
