Yesterday I did something I should have been doing for several years now. Something simple, yet so incredibly difficult.
I went by the nursing home just a few blocks down from our house. I’m familiar with this nursing home for many reasons. I drive by it at least once a day. My grandmother lived there in the last few years before she passed away. My husband worked there for a season. I sang carols there as a child with my Girl Scout troop and church groups. I’ve been in it… and through it… and, I know enough about it to want to avoid it.
But, yesterday, I was on a mission. I went to see an old friend. For the last few years, my childhood babysitter, Ms. Z, has been living there on the first floor with a feeble body but a clear mind.
Just before Christmas, my mom and I took the girls by to see her. There in a very small, sterile, semi-private room, this warmly familiar lady who was such a part of my childhood lies in a bed reading whatever she can find to read, watching a television smaller than our toaster, making the most of the occasional visitors and casual conversations that arise, but primarily… simply existing as best as anyone could in such an environment.
As I struggled to find things to talk about and ways to keep my mind off the sights and sounds that make nursing facilities so disturbing, I turned around to see the decor on her wall. There were flowers, notes, a calendar. And, then, I saw them… our family Christmas cards from the past two years tacked up on her little allotment of wall space. It was the most humbling moment of the entire Christmas season for me. Not only does she remember me, but she looks at pictures of my family… of my children… every painstakingly long day.
Suddenly, I realized how negligent, how unaware, how self-absorbed I have been to not have gone by this place more often… even if just for a minute, if nothing more than once a month.
Ms. Z’s health is deteriorating. She sleeps a lot. She looks much older than I remember her being. I don’t know whether to blame the nursing home environment itself or more simply a combination of age and health issues, but she is steadily declining. Yet, her personality is in tact. She is still kind and gracious. She still has her endearing sense of humor. Reader’s Digest is still her favorite magazine. Unlike me, Ms. Z seems to have a natural tendency to see the good in people and circumstances (even those as dire as her current living situation) rather than to dwell on the negative.
She certainly doesn’t deserve to be there where she is. No one does. She has risen above what most anyone would consider to be an unfair share of hardship during her lifetime, and her confinement there seems like only one more stroke of injustice. But, she has never been one to pity herself. She is a survivor, a fighter, a remarkable woman in so many ways.
And, so, yesterday I went to drop off a new magazine and a copy of our community paper… something I should have been doing regularly for a long time now. It was shamefully simple and long overdue. Ms. Z was sound asleep when I went in, but I scribbled a note, set the magazine on her nightstand, and went on my way.
I’ll be back, though, even if it’s true that every time I go in that place I can feel a lump rising up in my throat and I find myself having to fight back tears of sadness, frustration with the system, despair over the troubling sights and sounds…
That excuse is losing its validity.
If only in the form of magazines and newspapers, it’s my turn to do a little bit of the care-giving.
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