Don’t die too young, Mom
I worked the dinner shift at the Assisted Living facility tonight. After making sure my charge ordered what she wanted, and ate without spilling on her jacket, I looked around me. Of all the grey heads bent over their food, most of them are women, only two or three in couples. I observed one couple. He kept looking at her, maybe in adoration but I know he is losing his memory and I suspect he relies on her for everything, maybe always has. Conversation in the room seemed generally stilted and difficult, the impediments being hearing loss, disinterest and an inability to communicate effectively anymore.
Many of these old people live here alone. They wander the halls, alone; they attend the programs, alone; and go to dinner, alone. You find them congregated sometimes but the less able ones can’t do that. I saw an elderly man sitting alone in the dining room and wondered what my husband will be like at that age. Will he be alone? Will he be lonely? I don’t want that for him. My heart ached.
My charge has no family living anywhere nearby. Her world has shrunk as her memory fails and all she has daily are us, her employed caregivers. No family stops by regularly, they can’t, they live states away. I have watched the consequences of her choice not to live near her sons, to forgo the comforts of family for the immediate: her professional life, friends, her home, all now mostly gone as she approaches her 100th year. She is lonely for her sons, their children and her great grandchildren. She is frustrated she cannot touch them and talk to them face to face. Sometimes her befuddled brain confuses her interactions with the electronic photographs streaming on a device in her room for real live connection with them all. I don’t want that. I want to be the kind grandma who lives nearby that everyone loves to have around. I want them to look after me in my dotage.
My youngest son recently expressed his wish that I be around for his children, that I wouldn’t die too young. He wants his children to know their grandmother. Flattering for me that he should have such a wish. I hope to be near my boys and their families when I get old. I will want my independence but with the knowledge that they are close by. Then I may not be lonely if my husband passes on before me.
I know that I am created by a loving God to love Him and to be loved by Him. Something went wrong with mankind a long time ago that cut me off from Him and it takes me all my energy to reconnect with him. Miraculously, he has done the reconnecting work so I actually don’t have to do anything except keep in touch with him. It is a gift I receive gratefully and mindfully, or mindlessly some days, but he’s done the hard part.
Still, there is a deep darkness inside of me that lurks always. It emerges, leaks out, at times unexpected. This darkness, shading my God-made soul, lies to me, telling me that I will be abandoned, that really I am truly alone. What exists inside this darkness is fear and loneliness, big drivers in how I lead my life.
I guess because God created us for connection, with Him and each other, when there is forced aloneness, it feels wrong.
There is something about eating alone that evokes great loneliness for me. Maybe it’s because eating should be a convivial and shared, not just filling the stomach with food to survive. I watched a movie years ago with a scene of a deprived little boy eating stolen food alone. I cried for hours. It struck a cord deep within me.
I felt that cord again tonight and it hurt.
