Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

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Turning my mother-in-law’s house into home sweet home

I moved into the house I have lived in for nearly half a century kicking and screaming. Not physically, of course. But in my head I was railing. I did not want to move from the small, two-bedroom ranch that was my husband’s and my first home. I loved everything about that house — the kitchen cabinets we painted yellow a few months before our wedding, the living room with its 1970s green, wall-to-wall carpet (which I loved to vacuum), the family room my Uncle Frank fashioned from our one-car garage when I was newly pregnant and making plans to turn our TV room into a nursery…

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Medicare's pound-foolish rules

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Medicare's pound-foolish rules

She doesn't say, "I can't" or "I won't," or "Why me?" She simply doesn't complain. She wakes up in the morning, puts a smile on her face and plays the hand she's been dealt. She has to use a slide board to get from her bed to her wheelchair. The middle-of-the-night transfer is the toughest. It's dark and she's tired and it's a huge effort to shimmy onto the board, position the board onto the wheelchair, ease her body into the chair and wheel out of the bedroom into the bathroom…

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One more day to live in the sun

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One more day to live in the sun

Five weeks after she had her second leg amputated the doctors sent her home with health aides coming in just a few hours a day. I was terrified for her and for me. How could this 85-year-old woman live without constant help? How would she get from the bed to the wheelchair, from the wheelchair to the bathroom? How could she maneuver the wheelchair through an opening so small that I had trouble when I pushed the chair? Where would she get the strength and the patience to perform such a task?

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Wee steps and slow

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Waiting. That's what we've been doing. Waiting for the drugs to work, for the infection to abate, for the pain to go away, for the snow to fall, for Christmas to come. Waiting. That's what we continue to do. Monday we heard the forecast: a major winter storm. Monday we heard another forecast: my mother-in-law’s foot has to be amputated.. Silence then, and terror, too. Not the artificial kind buoyed by hysterical newscasters who caution people to bottle water and stock up on batteries because of some potential danger. Butl terror fueled by the inevitable…

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Turning 85 is a present for all those who love her

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When she was 80, we bought her 80 presents. It took a while to find 80 things that an 80-year-old didn't already have and could eventually use, but we did. We bought shortbread and jelly and notepaper and stamps and dusting powder and assorted teas, and wrapped all the gifts in silver foil and tied them with white bows then placed them in and around a pink hatbox. The presents, by their sheer number, made 80 look inviting. My mother-in-law, surrounded by family and friends, sat in the living room and talked and laughed as she unwrapped each present…

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Some angels take human form

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Some angels take human form

The poster has been hanging on my office door for nearly two years now. It's an angel poster. I've read it a hundred times. "Angels are the guardians of hope and wonder, the keepers of magic and dreams," it begins. Angels, as in spirits, heavenly visitors who keep you from harm's way; phantoms, shadows, apparitions, guardians from another world. That's what I've always thought…

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We need to see all of life's road

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Her feet are cold and swollen and sore. She lies in a hospital bed, her legs elevated higher than her heart. Every morning her toes are painted with some antibacterial solution, then wrapped in small sausage-like pieces of gauze. Next her feet are shrouded in white. From her ankles down, she looks like a mummy. The problem is circulation…

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Two women, one friendship

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I have come to know Julia slowly, a young woman whose husband died of cystic fibrosis a few months before their son Jeffrey was born. After his death, the priest at our parish spoke of Julia's faith and courage. But she was a stranger then. I had no idea she was my mother-in-law’s next door neighbor. It was after that day in church that my mother-in-law began mentioning Julia, but I didn’t connect the dots. I didn’t realize that the priest’s Julia and my mother-in-law’s Julia were one and the same. Because Julia, then, was just a name…

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