Life’s : Mother and Son

            For example, there was the day that I found out from an MRI that I had a bullet in my arm. When I asked Mom about it, she said she was surprised I grew to adulthood with things I did. I said, “But think of the adventures.”

            In Mom’s last couple of years, she was in an assisted living center near us. The responsibility for much of her care fell to my wife and me. We took her to doctor appointments, shopped for her, got her books out of the library, and did whatever we could to help her enjoy life. I tried to take the lion’s share of it since she was my mother, but that often put us in the situation where my sense of humor rubbed up against her seriousness.

            One of the challenges is that when I say something that contradicts all reason, I do it with a straight face, and Mom never realized I was teasing. Sometimes my wife will tell me I should smile now and then when I talk that way so people know.

            One day, Mom asked me to help her go through some boxes that she had us store in her room. Everything else was in a storage unit or at my house or one of my siblings’ houses.

            “I want to see what’s in those boxes,” Mom said.

            “You mean, you’re having these boxes take up valuable floor space and you don’t even know what’s in them?” I asked.

            “What is so valuable about the floor space?” she asked.

            “If the boxes were gone, you could jog in circles around the room and prepare to run a marathon,” I replied.

            “Why would I want to run a marathon?” she asked. “I’m ninety-five years old.”

            “That way you could cross it off your bucket list.”

            She scowled at me. “That has never been on my bucket list.”

            “I can imagine,” I replied. “With all of these boxes, there was nowhere to train.”

            Her glare deepened, and I thought I should get busy pulling stuff out of the boxes. I pulled the first one over and started to hand her things to look through.

            At one point, she exclaimed, “Well, will you look at this? Here is my Social Security card. I wondered where that was.”

            “It’s good you found it,” I said. “Now you can legally apply for a job.”

            She looked at me with all seriousness. “Why would I want to apply for a job?”

            “Lots of reasons,” I replied. “To meet people, save for retirement, buy a fancy car. The possibilities are endless.”

            She scowled again, so I dug something else out of the box. We continued on this way for some time. She would consider everything she pulled out so seriously, and I often looked at it in just the opposite way. However, there were also things that I knew brought back good memories, and instead of humor, I would ask her to tell me about them. We had a good visit about them.

            Eventually, the staff brought her dinner. As Mom ate, she contemplated her age and her life. “Son, what would you do if you were in my place, ninety-five years old, your health was failing, you were in an assisted living center, and you didn’t know how long you had left?”

            “Well,” I said. “I would always eat dessert first.”

            “That’s silly,” she said. Then she looked up at me and said, “Maybe that’s why you’re in the shape you are.”

            I almost think she might have smiled when she said that last part.