My poor old grandmother

My poor old grandma is 91. Her legs can barely hold her precarious weight. Her arms can barely lift the walker that supports a hobbled frame. Her memory can barely recover the names of young family members. Her name is Betty, and she lives a life of hardlies and maybes.

It must be a sad day, when your life reaches an age of inevitability - when there's no doubt that the worse will come soon, and that the abilities to enjoy the meanwhile have long since sauntered off - a certain defeat must come.

I see the once commanding mother of four resigned to a hunched form in a rocking chair. Casual speech is unintelligible, and her highest form of participation is one-and-a-half-sided conversation at best.

When no one visits her cabin by the beech, human contact comes almost solely from regular caretaker visits. Alex Trebek takes a close second. She knows this well and you can see it etched into her eyes when the laughter of conversation and company leave for Seattle.

I wondered how she got by until just a few days ago.

It was morning and the group was preparing mothers' day breakfast. Insisting on work, Betty fiddled away at the previous night's dishes. I grabbed my camera in some down time to snap a few frames.

"Oh stop you grandson" half laughed and half pleaded the washer. "My curlers are all in and I don't want to be seen not pretty". And there it was, the coping mechanism.

To keep sanity, my grandmother was hanging onto little points of pride. I realized that the scope went far beyond a few silly pink curlers. The table cloths perfectly pressed flat for company, the flowers that would solicit showers of rants if not planted every year, the orchard that had to be trimmed; all of these things were pieces of a greater thing.

An aging woman's dignity they formed.

In a way it seemed, that so many things were beyond her control. The few items that fell into personal jurisdiction then were magnified in importance. Let go of their beauty and tending and there really would be nothing. A pretty image and a lush garden meant that my grandmother still could hang on to some part of her life. They gave her something to keep walking for.

In noticing this, I learned two simple things.

Be kind to old people and pay attention to their minute interests. They don't have a whole lot else to live off.

Get your living out of the way now. At some point you will care very much about very little and wish you had done much more in the past.

Tim Wilder