This really is my Aunt Berdie and my Godmother. I tricked you all on that post a week ago. That picture was from the Internet. ha. Isn't Berdie pretty? She is 96 and only recently lost her Independence of living in her own apartment. Now she sits in that "Not so easy chair" and then gets help to stand up and turn around and sit in a "wheeling chair" only to get wheeled 30 feet to a dinner table where the aides put this HUGE bib on her to match her HUGE diaper they put on her "just in case." Then they wheel her back to her small room and into her "not so easy chair." Then they leave. She can have whatever she can reach. So she has a little red bucket with unwrapped Halls cough drops, a couple cookies, her nail file. Then on the floor is a small square holder with her embroidery work she cant see to do plus some odds and ends. Also one of those hospital eating rolling tray dealies with two drawers, one with her "stash" of cookies and the other her brush and old fashioned gold mirror, oh and the hair nets. So....that's her life. By the way she has five grandchildren and many Great Grandchildren. They don't come to see her. Well two have come a total of three times in all the time she has been there. She babysat for them all their lives, basically raised one of them or more.....helped them cook, clean, made crafts with them for shows and so on. She is so lonely and scared and now sad. Yesterday when I arrived I could see her face wasn't the same. She told me the aides move her too quickly in the middle of the night and she cant breath. I suspect she is having anxiety and hyperventilating. She says they just walk out and leave her and she thinks she is going to die right there alone. Then she says she sits in that "easy chair" and cries and gives up. Bunch of shit huh? By the way her 78 year old son and his girlfriend do visit every other day and I visit almost every day. But its her "little people" that she craves time with. The ones we call Grand-children.
I bought her a pretty bedspread yesterday but it was too big. So today I will return it and get a smaller one. It's a baby blue color vs that stripped green jail cell thing that is on her bed. I also got her a little crystal bear that lights up, for Valentines day...and a pretty card. She loves cards.
What to do? Dunno. Keep telling the Social Worker the issues at hand. Teach her to hold her breath if she starts huffing and puffing (hyperventilating), bring her long johns with peanuts on top, keep telling her jokes and making her laugh, keep tucking her in every night so she isn't alone, and talk to her soul to see if maybe its ready to go yet. I don't think so...seems like sometimes we have to stay longer than we want to, and suffer some more of this thing called life. Its like birthing a baby. When a woman gets so uncomfortable she cant stand it anymore is when natural childbirth is welcomed. So maybe natural death has to be really desired so we can get thru that canal also. I would say birthing and dying may not be as easy as we are led to believe. It is a dark canal with a light at the end, either way. The canal being the tough part I suspect... Even the Bible says we "get to" feel everything we dished out to others all our lives...oh goodie! And in fact the Bible says Jesus went to Hell for three days which is probably that canal reliving I just mentioned...that has to be hell ya think? Then the light....well hopefully the light and not the other. Just kidding!
