INDECISION

I didn’t want to go—I didn’t want to stay, but knew a year had somehow gone up in smoke while my grand daughters had become teens and I played Ms. Rip Van Winkle. Their mom, my sister Thelma , was ill, severely ill. Yes, yes, she needed me. I wanted to be there, hold her hand for most-likely the last time, yet cringed imagining it. My mental battle ended.

Ensconced in a rumpled hospital bed in her living room, she was ashen white. Her hair had turned thin, stringy gray. Yet, I was sure I saw her eyes sparkle a bit, her mouth turn up into a smile, when she saw me. Gumption was still a big part of her. Thelma tuned into me, corrected my grammar, my pronunciations, making me laugh. We laughed together, trying desperately to hold back the tears.

The house was too hot for me. The thermostat was kept on 74. My nieces would not allow me to open a single window as more germs might come in. Unlike me, I slept naked, sweating thru the nights. Each morning I straightened my bed, made neat hospital corners. Tom, my brother-in-law, didn’t like my corners. A few times I caught him outside my room trying to look nonchalant. As soon as I said ‘Good morning,’ and walked to the stairway, he made a mad dash into my room, pulled out the hospital corners and left the sheet loose, touching the floor. It wasn’t easy, but I kept my mouth shut. Each evening I shook the sheet that had been dangling, did my corners, and left them like that. It was a silly, childish battle that I eventually lost.

Aside from that, Tom, was always pleasant to me. He sat by Thelma’s bed, caring for her, feeding her, reading to her. Not once did he raise his voice, let his shoulders droop. The girls went on school buses daily, came in to talk to Thelma as soon as they came home. I grocery shopped, fixed good, tasty meals with plenty of left overs for the freezer. Still, this was not my house. There were rules I had to follow. ‘Don’t waste water, particularly hot water. Turn faucets off tightly; take quick showers; put nothing in the toilet except what normally goes there. What else is there? I asked Tom and was told too much toilet paper at one time clogs their pipes and there are floods. There I was, unable to use too much water, but should flush more than once rather than put too much tissue in the bowl. ‘Whoever makes the flood cleans it up!’ I was careful not to be ‘IT.’

After dinners, when the kitchen was clean, Thelma had her last shot of morphine, my nieces joined me in the den. They hugged me, pulled childish memories from my creaking mind of games, songs that Thelma and I experienced. They wanted to know about our parents, where they came from, were they old, mean, handsome, ugly. Did they speak English? Was Grandma a good cook? I regaled them with stories. Sometimes I couldn’t hold back my tears, especially when I realized Tom was not with us. He sat by Thelma’s side until he said, ‘Goodnite’ to us.

Thelma’s life had been too short–too long, she passed on the ninth morning of my ten day visit. That too, was too short–too long.

Tom had a lot to do but surely took a minute or two to pull out my hospital corners before he took me to O’Hare.