To Age the Same

She stood there with a look of hurt frustration on her face.  I was there to clean up and help with my father.  The angry tirade tired me.  Her face dripped with sweat from the emotional intensity of her fit.  She knew we had seen and heard.  What she didn’t know was how many times we had seen and heard the same thing.  It was hard to imagine; it was harder to process.

There was a tendency to just scream out “You’re mean!  You’ve always been mean and you’ll probably die mean someday.”  I actually expressed that feeling to my husband in hurt anger at least once and probably more times than he ever wanted to hear.  I knew it was just a reaction to my own lack of answers.  

But after my father died, my thoughts went from what was to what needed to happen.  It didn’t occur quickly or as a single epiphany.  But through prayer and love I began to work through and see through the frustration in me and the frustration in her.  It became almost my obsession to see her healed of her emotional wounds.

I recall her standing there in a sweaty frustration, after one long irrational tirade that followed an event of incontinence on the part of my father, saying “When is it my turn?  Everyone cares about him; everyone feels sorry for him.  I’m old too.  You dote on his every word; you pamper him and doctor him.  You bathe him.  When is it my turn?”

I tried to turn it to a lighter mood by saying “You want me to give you a bath?”  But the mood didn’t lighten.  The look on her face said what her words could not.  Yes, she did.  I was dumbfounded and I wasn’t giving her a bath. 

My father was not far from death, though we couldn’t foretell that.  Taking care of him was what she needed me to do.  I was doing that for her as much as for him.  I cared about them both.  I doctored him early in the morning before she was awake, before I went to work.  Then I helped him dress, fixed him some fruit and water and went about my day.  In the evening, my husband and I went back to help him out of his trousers, to bathe and wrap his legs –recovering from ruptured ulcers caused by diabetes- to wash his arms and face down and prepare him to sleep in his recliner where he could breathe better and be somewhat elevated.  My mother supervised a private bath every couple of days. 

Daddy’s world had closed in.  He was still able to wander out to the small deck we had built on the back of the house so he could breathe the cold fresh air and listen to the birds.  On occasion, the wheelchair we bought him would cart him to the curb for a trip to the store or clinic and on rare occasions, we would load him and the wheelchair into our vehicle and take them for an outing – just because.  Everything in life right then evolved around daddy and his care.  At night we would share a snack and visit while the TV droned on in the background.  It always started amiable enough.  After a bit we’d get him to stand and help him out of his pants, covering him with a huge bathsheet for decency.  Then I’d prepare my warm water and ointment and the elastic wraps which would need discarded the next morning.  Eventually, the ulcers healed and I was able to use heavier ones that I could wash. 

Somewhere in the course of it all, the storytelling would begin.  Old stories that we loved to hear again: old fun and funny memories from my childhood and before.  My father was a story teller by nature and my husband and I relished the tales.  My mother, while thankful for the help, felt left out of the love.  She felt old, out of control and set aside and she became angry every night.  It was a struggle to regain her self-worth.  I would see that one day.

After my father went into the hospital and then into a nursing home, we stopped going every night.  I stopped going every morning.  I did go.  I took her shopping as often as she would go with me and I bought anything she wanted or needed that her funds didn’t supply.  I visited my dad fairly regularly, but the push, the intense time of caring was over. 

After daddy died, mom felt the neglect return.  There was no longer a need to go to the nursing home and supervise my dad’s mealtime.  Everything seemed so empty.  We tried to get her to join in our world but she would not.  She tried to make a world of her own but she could not.  She eventually moved to Louisiana to be closer to my sister.  But my desire for her to find peace and love and self-acceptance intensified.

Her visits were filled with a struggle to get understanding on my part.  And a struggle to convince me how bad her life had been with my father on her part. It was a time of alternated cringing and sharing.  She had so much anger to work through.  I just wanted her to be happy.

Mom was always an emotional person full of highs and lows, but I remember so many good times.  I remember how she loved to have me brush her long golden hair.  I recall her diligence in the gardens about our home and the excitement when she succeeded in some quest involving that plot of earth. 

She gave so much to others.  She really wanted the world to love her and be fixed: fixed of their illness; fixed of their emotional pain; fixed of their poverty.  Yet she always waited on a love that would be enough to fix her own pain and the illness and poverty of her past.  My father could not supply that –nor could I.  But in these final days she is learning the ways of peace.

I am getting old.  I often feel abandoned by those I love the most, like an old shoe that no one wants to wear, but no one can throw away.  My heart says things my lips will not –words I recall from my mothers days of frustration.  I ask myself “How much of this is just association and how much of this is a result of aging?”  And yet I’ve seen that road; I know its ruts.  If this is a normal process of aging, I must find my victory more quickly.  If this is the time of insatiate love that all older people go through, I must find peace before it alienates me and leaves me bitter.  I want to be a pleasant old person.  I want to be one of those prayer giants that smile a lot and believe the best.  It sounds like an easy choice; it’s not.  And yet, it is a choice.