I wondered, after I spoke to my mother on the telephone last night and wished her "Happy New Year," how many more annual turns of the calendar she will experience. I felt a twinge of guilt that I and my youngest son, who has been visiting from Houston for two weeks, could not easily make the time to visit her during the holiday season. She understood, she said, just as I understand that he has cut his visit home short by a few days for several logical reasons. I will cry, as I always do but try not to do, at his departure this afternoon, and I wonder if my mother has shed a tear or two of loneliness during the holiday hoopla.
Tricky, these emotions, as they conduct battle inside one's heart and mind, thus holding a certain power. They struggle for expression, and they will find it, one way or another, perhaps healthfully, perhaps not.
Instead of diving into this pool of vulnerability, my mother and I both chuckled when she said her friends and neighbors at Grandview Terrace in Sun City West, Arizona, had planned to ring in the New Year at 8:30 p.m., but "half of the crowd had already left."
Such is the life at a retirement home where I, at the age of . . . let's just say past 50, am often the baby in the crowd. Nonetheless, these residents keep busy with daily exercise, games and interest groups and as many trips and excursions as one cares to take. Even she, at 95 and finally having to carry a supply of oxygen to counteract her emphysema, plays bridge twice a week, takes the bus to the grocery store, walks to the dining room for her meals, and knits afghans for everyone she knows while her Burmese cat, Collette, snoozes in her lap. Safe subjects for discussion, all.
As I wonder about the rest, the subcutaneous whisperings, I keep coming back to the realization that today -- this first day of 2009, this moment -- as I write this blog, this is all I have.
