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The guys hauled in her big bureau, the one we’d painted eons before antique chartreuse green. On top, I placed the picture of her wedding to Dad, 73 years before.
The last of her small stuff. Her maroon walker with the little green frog she’d fashioned from sewing scraps and tied with a piece of purple yarn onto the handle bars to differentiate hers from all the others at her senior apartment building. She used the walker to lean on to get around inside her apartment. I rolled past the aides with the walker piled with Mom's toaster oven on top of her microwave. Inside, the glass jar of dried cranberries, the round cardboard box of Quaker Oats, instant coffee and a giant jar of peanut butter. I could already see her in this new place, rising to make her breakfast, just like always, just like before.
Seventy years of having a mom, a mom who listened and supported me. My anchor, my security. Her joy at my triumphs, the time my newspaper sent me to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall. And the disappointments, the promotions that didn't go through, the men who always seemed to break my heart.
Twenty years since Dad died, we'd been a pair. So much we'd been through medically with her tired old body. Her round face, usually so pleasant, her jaw would go hard, her mouth a straight line. She called it her "hospital mode." The determination that got her through heart bypass surgery and then a groin to ankle graft that saved her gangrenous foot. Hadn't I just seen that look on her face?
What the doctors were saying, that word, terminal. Congestive heart failure that would only get worse. Intellectually, I got it, but emotionally, I couldn’t even begin to grasp the meaning. It was like a giant precipice with me standing on the edge, unable to go farther. I couldn’t let myself absorb what I might feel at her death. Despite all the signs around me.
Her motorized scooter, the one thing that had made it possible for her to continue in her independent senior apartment. When the guys took it off their truck, I drove it in. Turned the key and sailed down that hallway. For the first time, I realized, no one else in this place had one. They were all in wheelchairs that they'd move forward step by step, pushing with their feet. I parked the scooter in the studio, next to the bed, in the corner next to the kitchen cabinets.
The day I moved her in, Mom's first comment was, "Sure is compact." Always a quiet person, never a complainer, she had just one wish. "I would have liked to have chosen what came with me." Most of all she regretted the loss of her sewing machine, part of the payment I gave the San Salvadoran movers. The rest of her furniture from her apartment I donated to charity, something she'd told me to do long before if it became necessary.
Even so, she soldiered on, the lone person driving herself to the lunchroom where the residents ate. She didn't like the food, lots of processed frozen entrees heated by the cook, but she found a permanent place at a table with other nonagenarian ladies, whom she came to like. Always sharp, she said the thing I was so denying. "These poor old people, they're all here to die. And they don't even give them something good to eat."
I took solace that she wasn't including herself in that group. But, then the bleeding started. She never even got to make her own breakfast. Back to the hospital, to emergency. At first, doctors said it was just an old problem, hemorrhoids. They got the bleeding to stop. But they sent her home with oxygen, now required just to get by.
The pretty brown patterned quilt, the one the'’d never used because she said Dad would sit on it and break the threads, the one that we'd hung on a special hanger next to the foot of the bed was the first thing to go. To make room for the knee-high machine that burbled in its place, creating the oxygen that traveled in long clear plastic tubing up to her face.
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