by Kathy Brasby | Mar 14, 2014 | Seasons
Freida leaned close to her granddaughter. “See that man over there?”
She pointed across the living room to a man sitting in a recliner watching television.
Her granddaughter, who was arrived the evening before Thanksgiving, nodded.
“Well,” Freida continued, her white hair in tight curls on her head. “He lost his wife, you know. Poor man.”
Jill pulled her head back. “Oh, no, Grandma. That’s my dad. You’re talking about my mom and she’s in town right now. She’ll be home in a little while.”
“Oh.” Freida cocked her head to the side. “All right.”
Five minutes later, she leaned toward Jill. “See that man over there?”
Jill took a deep breath. She’d already heard the story about Grandma’s Christmas choir – when Grandma was a teenager. Every five minutes or so, she heard the story again.
“Mom,” she asked when her mother walked in the back door, “what do you do about Grandma’s repeating stories?”
“Do the best you can,” she said.
Jill sat down with her grandmother again. “Did you sing in the choir, Grandma?”
Freida’s eyes lit up. “Let me tell you about the time when the Christmas tree caught on fire in the church.”
Jill knew the story. During the Christmas eve service, the candles on the tree bit into the wood and an usher grabbed a bucket from the back of the church.
“He tossed the water from the bucket onto the tree,” Freida said. “But he missed the tree and hit the choir. Bucket and all!” And she laughed.
Jill took her hand. “Do you have any bills to pay, Grandma?”
Freida tilted her head, her eyes puzzled. “I don’t know.”
“Do you worry about getting fired from your job?”
“I don’t think I have a job. I’m an old woman.”
Jill took her hand. “Do you have any worries?”
“What’s there to worry about?”
Jill kissed her grandmother on the forehead. “God has been kind,” she said.
Freida nodded. “I always remember that.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 7, 2014 | Seasons
The doctor searched the emergency room cubicle until she found my eyes. Then she took a quick breath. “We have the x-rays. Her hip is broken.”
I was holding my mother’s hand as she lay still on the examining table. The pain had escalated while we’d been at the hospital and she was now under the influence of morphine. She had no idea what the doctor had said.
I drew a longer breath than the doctor. “So what are our options?
“Hip replacement surgery. Or do nothing.” The doctor’s eyes were kind and she waited until I responded. “This is considered major surgery.”
Mom, at 83, was already trying to recuperate from a stroke nine months earlier. Could she withstand a surgery?
My sister stood across the table from me and our eyes met.
“How soon do we have to decide?” she said.
The doctor shrugged. “You can talk about it with family. The surgeon would do it as soon as possible. Probably this afternoon.” She stepped to the doorway. “I’ll check back in a few minutes.”
“This is an awful decision,” my sister said. “She might not survive the surgery.”
“I know.”
Mom was sleeping. Before the morphine had kicked in, she’d been in tremendous pain.
“We have to give her a chance.” My sister said the words that I was thinking.
Within two hours, our mother was wheeled away by a surgeon. We hugged her and prayed for her. We assured her of our love for her. She could respond to none of it.
Would we see her again?
Our brother arrived a little later. “Any news?”
We explained our options. “She might not survive the surgery but we had to give her a chance for something better.”
He nodded. “What else could you do?”
We all knew Mom. And that made a hard decision a little clearer.
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by Kathy Brasby | Feb 28, 2014 | Seasons
I helped my dad shuffle up the steps into his house and I laid his mail on the kitchen counter. He slowly worked his way to his recliner and dropped in.
Mom was in the hospital following heart valve replacement surgery. Dad and I had made the 60-mile trek every day to visit her in her recovery. At 88, he couldn’t drive anymore. To be honest, we were a little nervous leaving him alone while Mom was gone.
“Do you need anything before I go home?” I shuffled through the stack of envelopes. “Uh, what is this bill?” I handed him the envelope.
“Our health insurance,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
“We don’t want to miss any payments with Mom in the hospital.” It was a joke when I said it, but then I saw an envelope attached to his refrigerator.
A stamped return envelope to his health insurance company.
“What’s this?” I handed it to him.
He squinted and leaned forward. “I haven’t mailed that yet. I’ll get it.”
“Let’s open this,” I held the new bill and sliced it open. “Dad, this is the current bill. Is that envelope on the refrigerator last month’s payment?”
“I can’t remember.” He shifted his weight, looking for his TV remote. “I’ll get it out to the mail.”
“How about if I pay this bill today?” I could sign their checks so that I was able to make this payment immediately.
“Sure, if you want to.”
I wrote the check for the current month and then took both payments home where I mailed them from my house.
And held my breath, hoping the insurance company wouldn’t balk at the coming hospital bills for Mom’s surgery.
They didn’t but that was the month I switched their insurance payment to an automatic debit from the bank.
Who wants to take chances like that, even if Dad did think he had it covered?
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by Kathy Brasby | Feb 21, 2014 | Seasons, Stories
The list came together one afternoon about a week after my dad’s funeral, when my mother, sister and I gathered for tea and brainstorming.
“What do we need to do now?” I asked.
We were all missing Dad, but he had passed at 90 after a year of increasing weakness and difficulty. He had died with his family at hand after many had been able to say goodbye.
Seeing loved ones leave is never easy but his hadn’t been unexpected.
Now we needed to gather ourselves.
“The funeral home took care of some things,” Mom said. “The obituary is done and we own two burial plots now.”
It had been easier to purchase two when we bought Dad’s.
“We need to send out thank you notes,” my sister said. We spent some time compiling a list, going through the cards that had come in.
“Why don’t you do the ones you know and I’ll do the ones I know?” I suggested. “Mom, you get the rest.”
She smiled. “I guess that will work.” As it turned out, that was closer to equal for us than I had guessed.
“We need a thank you note in the paper,” my sister said.
Mom wanted the recording of Dad’s funeral digitized so she could have it on a CD.
“We need to check with Medicare and Social Security,” I added. “I don’t know what needs to be done there.”
As it turned out, the funeral home took care of that.
Mom had to change the registration on their car to her name and cancel Dad’s Medicare gap insurance. So that went on the list.
“What about the bank?” Mom asked. “Do I have enough money to live on until we get things sorted out?”
We called the bank. The beauty of a revocable trust such as my parents had is that the checking account was in the trust name. All Mom needed to do was take a copy of the death certificate in to verify Dad’s passing. She had immediate access to her funds.
“I want a memorial fund,” Mom said. “For the money that was donated. Something in Dad’s name.”
I was amazed how quickly we had moved from the must-do list – things like bank accounts an insurance – to the “in memory” list.
“How about a headstone?” my sister added. That went on the list.
Before the afternoon was over, we had about 15 things to do. Most of them were checked off quickly.
It was a good thing, too, because within five weeks of that tea party, Mom was hospitalized with a stroke.
Without the list, there would have been a lot of things overlooked.
I’m not always big on lists but I’m very glad we made that one.
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by Kathy Brasby | Feb 14, 2014 | Seasons
Mildred’s eyes lit up when I approached her table at the dining room and I patted her hand.
“It’s so good to see you,” I said. Mildred had just transferred from an assisted-living facility to the nursing home.
She gave me her familiar broad smile. “It’s good to see you, too. You’ll have to remind me of your name.”
I had lead a devotional class at her assisted-living home for several years and Mildred never missed. “I look forward to this every week,” she’d told me more than once. She always made good comments, recalling stories from her youth and sermons from her pastor.
I hadn’t been to her facility in several months and she had re-entered my life at the nursing home where my mother now resided.
“Remember me from the Cedars?” I asked. “I used to see you every week there.”
“Oh?” Her eyes searched my face and I could see her mind trying to make connections. None came. “My memory isn’t as good as it used to be.”
But her smile was still there. Her love of people was still there.
I was sorry to lose those years we’d had together, although glad to re-connect.
Whenever I see Mildred, I always touch her hand. “It’s so good to see you,” I tell her.
And she always responds, “It’s so good to see you, too. You’ll have to remind me of your name.”
And I always do.
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by Kathy Brasby | Feb 7, 2014 | Seasons
When my mother was 80 years old, she climbed onto a 4-wheeler and drove it down the lane and back.
She spent most mornings from April to September in her yard, pulling weeds. May was for planting and October for raking the limp leaves.
Although my father had made all the auto purchases in the family, she took that on in her 80s and selected the car she wanted.
She’d call a family member in the afternoon. “I need you to come over here for supper and help me get all this food eaten.” And they’d come because she’d prepare a nice spread for a meal, often including a pie.
One day at breakfast, the kids and I decided it would be a good day to visit the zoo. “Let’s invite Grandma,” one of them said.
“Uh, we need to leave in a hour,” I said. I didn’t think that even my mother, who adjusted to almost anything, could pull that off.
She did. “Sure, I think that’ll be fun.”
Mom walked all over the zoo that day and helped me tend to energetic kids. Wonder where they got that kind of energy?
@copyright Kathy Brasby
So when we decided to make a trip into the Colorado Rockies to view the fall aspen colors, of course Mom came along.
Although she slept all the way up on the two-hour trip and slept most of the way, home, too.
Two weeks later, we found her on the floor beside her bed with a useless left arm and leg. A stroke.
Her life changed in a moment.
She still has the same spunk, the same drive to go. But she has to go in a wheelchair now.
It’s a cliche but life is precious. I’m glad Mom had those adventures and did all she did. The memories keep us all going as we walk through another season in Mom’s life.
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