As I get older I never really have thought about what that all means. I know that the number changes every year and the candles on the cake grow and they grow so much that you just don't want to set the cake on fire so you use the two numbers sometimes to make your age. I never really thought about what it is really like getting old. I guess I only concentrated in the moment and never really looked into the future too much. Aging never really bothered me at all. I would say oh it is just a number but I found out this week just how that number can affect your quality of life.
My mom had me when she was 25 a few months from her 26th birthday so she is going to be 76 on her birthday in October. I recently noticed her aging sort of slowing down in many ways. Walking slower, talking slower and more deliberately sometimes. Sometimes she would have to think a few more seconds to answer a question and I thought that is all a part of aging. I was thinking that in about 25 years give or take a year or two that I could be her, walking slower, hesitating more with my speech and getting a few more wrinkles and graying of the hair and thinner bones. She is a beautiful woman to me and always will be. Then something happened that scared me. She went to the hospital. She hates hospitals with a passion and anyone who knows her knows that. So, it was scary for me and her when that night I had to call 911 because I thought she was having a stroke. Unfortunately, I was right she had a small stroke but then she suffered another injury while in the hospital a broken hip. I realized how fragile she is and how fragile life is. I realized that I can't take her for granted any more and just assume that she will be here for the next 5 or ten or fifteen years. I can't assume that she will see my son graduate from junior high or even high school in 8 years. I think that my life and her life flashed right before my eyes that night as the paramedics loaded her into the ambulance and took her away.
Today I visited her at the nursing home where she is recovering from the hip. Today I saw an much older woman, a woman with more wrinkles and more lines from life that I had ever noticed before. I noticed her thinning hair and more grey hairs then before. I noticed her demeanor was not the same. Her laughter was gone. Her smile was gone. Her words were there but her memory was confused sometimes and she thought she was at home in the comfort of her own bed, watching her own television. She wanted her red sweater, the one she wears when she gets cold. She didn't want strangers parading in and out of her room, poking and prodding her like she was just a piece of meat. She didn't like sitting in a room that was not her own. She didn't like not waking up in her own bed in the mornings and eating her own breakfast not some tasteless food that is placed in front of you and if you eat it you eat it and if you don't they can care less and remove the food when your time was up. She doesn't like a time limit and wearing a diaper not being able to walk to the bathroom and having to look at her roommate using the portable potty in the corner of the room. This is not her idea of spending one minute of her golden years in a room she doesn't recognize with people she doesn't know coming and going.
I had to be her voice today and I had to be a loud, bossy, bold voice today. I will always be her voice when she looses hers. I hope that she never does and when these dreadful two weeks are over by some little miracle she returns to us as good as she left us.
Now, I know what getting older is about. I have taken off my rose colored glasses today.
No comments:
Post a Comment