Stages of Life

My niece recently published a beautiful tribute to her mother, detailing the debilitation age has brought but celebrating a spirit that insists on not letting these disabilities keep her from traveling or from otherwise participating in the life around her.  (lazygal.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-mother-is-alien.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FNqJH+%28Killin%27+time+being+lazy%29).  My niece’s mother is my sister, six years younger than I am and a college classmate of my wife, which was a friendship that resulted in our marriage.

Radcliffe permitted her to keep a car so that she could readily visit our father who was a widower and lived alone.  It was a white Ford convertible with a blue top.  Once when driving with the top down, she stopped next to a truck at a traffic light.  The truck driver leaned out his window and shouted, “Hey, Red, you’re looking like a queen!”  And she must have looked like one because she was a spectacularly attractive young woman, with her curly red hair and her long legs, shown to advantage in the chorus line of a college musical in which she participated.  But she viewed her attractiveness as a disadvantage, fearful that people valued her only for her looks.

Her hair is now white – I think she was glad when the color turned – but she was never simply a good-looking woman.  Of our parents’ three children, she is, in my opinion, the cleverest. When I told her that I loved raisins, she said, “they’re your raison d’être.”  When I asked her if she’d like some wine, she asked for “a thimbolic amount.”   

It’s hard to apprehend the physical changes that have overtaken her.  She has difficulty rising from chairs.  She can no longer take long walks.  “She still has the chorus girl legs…” writes my niece, “but the knees are swollen, as are her ankles and there are no high-kicks in the near future.”  Three of her fingers are notably arthritic.  The changes my niece saw were so great that she viewed her mother as an alien, a stranger.  It seems unfair that my sister’s physical disabilities are so much greater than mine.

Can this be the same person whom I tortured, along with my brother, with tales of Cobra Island?  Can she be the girl I drove to and from school and took shopping for clothes after our mother died?  Is this the bride at whose wedding I served as best man?  My niece summed it up very well when she noted my sister’s infectious laugh.  “My mother has a laugh that can verge on the hysteric – so much fun except when she’s driving!  And she’s Mom again.” 

My sister’s laughing sets me off on a laughing jag and together we laugh until it’s hard to keep our breath.  We stop, breathe deeply, and start laughing again.  As long as we’re both compos mentis, and even if we’re not, I trust this will never change.



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