Wait a bit longer, twilight

For me, there is nothing harder than watching the strongest woman I know lose a little bit of that force within her every day.

There are those who would question her strength, because of the choices she made, but it is how she survived those choices that matters.

I watch her sitting on the old, worn out leather sofa, the same place that has become hers. Anyone else, including myself, sitting in that spot looks alien. I watch her, surrounded by papers, opened window envelopes, her black notebook in her lap, juggling with numbers, and bills. Who to pay today, who can wait for another week. I used to sit with her when she did that and had to stop, because it was just too much. One day I told her, that she should not have had to do this, to have this much stress on her in the seventh decade of her life . . .

I watch her, and go back to when I was small, and we lived in that apartment in Minnesota, how she saved and scraped up enough money from my father's stipend to make sure we had the best. I watched her collect green stamps and paste them in a book, or cardboard, and know that those stamps helped her buy things, but the first time I was really aware what it took for her to get us things, was when she denied me the Julia doll, the chocolate colored Barbie doll based on the series with Diahann Carroll. I begged and begged, but when she said we could not afford it, I knew that even if we had the best clothes, and things that rich folk might not even consider luxuries, a Barbie doll was a luxury.

My father's study used to be scattered with papers, and so I think it was either his birthday or Christmas one year, when she saved enough to buy a file cabinet. She carried that file cabinet on her own from the store to our apartment building, and that was no small distance, or lightweight cabinet. Whenever I hear that story, I think, Ma is the strongest woman I have ever known.

***
I have been watching her, the way her feet move most of the time, the look in her eyes. I ask her countless times a day how she is doing. She gets tired of my questions. She appreciates my concern but thinks I overdo it.

Earlier this week, she frightened me, with one of her low sugar episodes. She had not eaten her meal on time, and substituted it with a snack, a pumpkin chocolate chip cookie. Once we finally sat down to have lunch, it was not enough to maintain her sugar level. I left the family room for a few minutes, only to hear her call out to me. She was slouched in her seat, glass with pulp still in it asking me for another glass of orange juice. I know she may not have been aware of it at the time but I was a little frustrated with her, lecturing her on the importance of eating A MEAL on time. That just because a cookie has sugar in it does not mean it's going to tie you over for a while. I have told her this before, and with her other health problems . . . . I repeated this to her, covering fear with annoyance.

When she was feeling much better, I told her again, quietly yet firmly, of my concern regarding this. "This cannot happen when I am gone for two weeks. What if you are alone . . . ."

That time she did not tell me I was overdoing it.

***
I asked Ma to help me fill out some forms that I need to send in for determination regarding my health. It proved to be a more difficult task for her than I thought it would be, and at the end of it, she confessed something to me that hit me like my father's hand slapping my face.

As we moved on from what she had said, I kept thinking that I do need some help, but this woman, who had been so fiercely independent, and more so after her divorce, is not going to be that way ever again. She cannot be that way ever again. She is going to need more help with her day to day things than she is willing to admit. It was a sobering moment. A moment where I took a mental journey back to her life, as I knew it being around her.

We, and most "desis", have not had the experience of putting our parents in homes when they reach a certain age. I grew up with parents whose parents lived on their own, in their elderly age, but still close enough to where some of their children could see them every day.

As the time grows near to consider such things, I know that both of my parents are firmly against being put in homes other than the ones in which they live. I think my father has said he would rather die first. We, my siblings, and I would not want that for our parents either, especially for our mother. But the time is coming when we must be faced with decisions about caring for our parents, in a way not quite done so before, because of their fierce independence.

When I think about it, there are two huge tests that determine how adult you are: one, when you have children, and two, when your parents reach the point when they cannot take care of themselves.

I have never had children, but I watch Ma hobble around, and know that second test is coming . . . it is close . . . if it would just wait a bit longer . . . .