Life changes...

        “What would I do without you?” my mother says as she reaches to hold my hand.  She poses the unanswerable question almost daily since the stroke.  Before, she would ask me the same thing, but more as a way of saying thank you.  Then, I could make a lighthearted remark such as “you’d manage just fine” or “you are doing great, Mom.” Now, I feel only sadness and I don’t say what I am thinking.   I squeeze her hand, give her a hug, and tell her I’m here.

            Each day, I watch her struggle emotionally with the loss of independence.  Her reality now is being dependent on others for everything in daily life.  No matter how hard she works at her physical and occupational therapy and all the high praise she gets for “doing well” and for “improvement”… it’s not enough.  The therapists love her because she will do anything asked of her and will give it her all. I know how badly she wants to be in control.  “It’s just so hard,” she will say in rare moments.  Most of the time she doesn’t say anything but I know what she is struggling with this new development.

            I think about the little girl growing up in a secure and loving family in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1920’s.  Mother always told us how she was “an accident”.  My parents had built a new house with only enough bedrooms for two children and then I came along and there really wasn’t room.  My mother  always told this story with her arms around me.  Perhaps this is part of why that little girl was never a complainer and never wanted to draw attention to herself.  Could this be true?  I’ve asked myself this often. Mother always was one never to make a fuss -  the quiet, strong, and loving parent.

            Then I wonder would I have been as courageous at 24 as she was, to leave Iowa, the only place I had ever lived, and travel by myself to Santiago, Chile to marry the fiancée I had not seen in two years? In 1944 it took five days by propeller airplane to get to Santiago, stopping all along the way because planes could not travel at night. I grew up hearing this story many times. Nowhere in her detailed letters to her family does she ever complain or have second thoughts about having traveled 5,400 miles to get married.  I have asked her often why she never wrote about the hard times and she replied, “I didn’t want to worry my parents.”

           We  three children were each born in a different South American country where hospitals and health care were not good and our mother could barely communicate in Spanish. When my brother was born, he was put in the wrong crib in the hospital in Lima, Peru and my parents brought home a Peruvian baby. If he had not had red hair and blue eyes perhaps we would have never gotten him back! Mother turns pale when that story is told again all these years later.  My mother lived through two revolutions and a polio epidemic in Argentina, entertained the highest officials and oligarchy of third world countries helping my father’s career as a diplomat, managed a household of maids, gardeners and chauffeurs, raised three children, and found it all an adventure.

            My role model for growing old with  grace and always doing "the right thing" has been my mother.. But overcoming this recent stroke seems the hardest thing yet.  I don't see her giving up as I watch her slowly accept a new stage of dependence in her life. I heard her say to my brother on the phone today "I used to be independent but now I have to remember to ask for help."  She was reminding herself, of course.