To say I feel worse than helpless is an understatement. If I were a man, perhaps the word would be impotent, and then some.
I never left their house but what my belly was full of good, homemade food, my head and heart full of laughter and hilarious family stories, and my hands full of some fresh garden produce, canned goods, newly made afghan or homemade pillow. In an always repeated exchange born in the deep hills of Kentucky, they would ask me to stay, and I would ask them to come home with me, and I'd drive off in my car with those wonderful Mountain accents ringing in my ears, sweet ways of talking that are now fast fading from the hills with the coming of cable and dish TV.
Last Saturday I visited one aunt in her home, watched a gory mob movie with her all afternoon and was periodically visited by her ferrets and cats -- and left with canned tomatoes. On Sunday I visited my other aunt three and a half hours away who lay asleep in her chair after having been awake all morning, and even out to church, her daughter-in-law said. That would be the church services they have in the nursing home's cafeteria. She came to briefly, to her children saying, Momma, it's Lyn. Bob and Lyn are here. I was able to ask her how she was doing, and she told me she was a-doing okay, then drifted back off to sleep. I left there with those precious words uttered from her lips, words that I hadn't heard for quite some time because a chronic medical condition periodically floods her brain with ammonia, and takes away her ability to speak. But it had come back, just a couple of words, that fell like pearls on my ears, I so hungry for the accent, so lonely for the sweet twang and descriptions like "hain't nary."
I'm an orphan now, and that's been hard enough. But what will it be like when there are no more elderly aunts and uncles in my life to sit and listen to? No more stories from the old days, and those great long convoluted explanations of who's related to who? And it so much reminds me what I learned a long time ago -- we grieve for ourselves.
I'm so angry at their suffering. I'm so angry and useless and unable to do one single thing to ease any of it or take it away, or help at all especially when I know they would have moved mountains to ease my suffering. It seems so paltry to say, I love you. I'm so angry at this medical situation where they tell the family, who is already grieving this living death, that sorry, but your loved one can only be sick for x amount of days and then their benefits wear out. Well, we have jobs we can't quit, and she can't walk on her own. Well, sorry 'bout your luck. And by the way, you have to have a password to ask how they're doing. It's not a question of extending life by artificial means. They need no artificial means to stay alive, unless you want to count when you help them eat. We're not talking about ventilators and end of life and feeding tubes.
Will this new health care bill help? Don't see how it can when it's already taken, what is the amount, $500 billion out of Medicare? There are supposedly no caps on care? So what is this about only being able to stay here for x amount of days? Only a bunch of junk filled with special interest riders funding this and that project along the way that has nothing to do with health care, and old people, and never solving the basic problem, which is why on earth does one single, generic aspirin cost $10 in a hospital? And why do we disrespect our elders so badly?
They don't deserve to live and die like this.
Tomorrow I will make vegetable soup out of one of the cans of Maye's tomatoes, because she would want me to, but I'm not for sure I'll ever open the other can. I think I'll leave it sit on my top shelf, the deep dark red of the tomatoes like some lighthouse beacon keeping watch over my kitchen. Later I'll snuggle under Francie's afghan as I watch the evening news, and run my fingers over the intricate and precise crocheted stitches one by one. Later that night, as I try to fall asleep, I'll strain to remember that voice, that sweet, sweet voice from so long ago telling me the story of when the fox got the chicken and she sent my cousin Paul to bring it back -- the chicken, not the fox. The picture of the fox, chicken in his mouth and my long legged cousin Paul, then a lanky boy, leaping through the briars and rhododendron will make me smile, ever so briefly, before my eyes begin to spill in the dark night.
