COMING TOGETHER
We have come home.
  After 10 days in a recovery center, we are back among our own surroundings.  The nurses are gone, the tests, the watching over my mother and the case workers have gone on to someone else.
  I suppose it is not easy to do what they do, but the consolation might be that they do not see the end of anyone's life.  They see the recovery and the leaving for home.  Then they go on to someone else.  They do not see the failure of a heart, the end of breathing, the final closing of a life.  What they see is the recovery, the happiness of family who get to take their one home.

  Now mom is home.  She is back in her own bed, surrounded by her own things on the nightstand, her own kitchen where she knows what is where.  She has her own routine.  She can decide she doesn't want to do something just now.
  The phone will ring.  It's a great interruption, although my mother does get to speak with her life-long friends. She doesn't have to face them with her fading, splayed hair. 

  She says, 'I'm just not presentable.'

  Of course everyone knows that.  No one expects her to look like a movie star, but the vanity of all wishes comes out in anyone.
  Taking care of her is all about deciding what she needs to do and what she doesn't need to do.  I won't let her be lazy about getting out of bed, putting her clothes on, answering the phone, walking around the apartment property.  At the same time, I can't be too strict.  She needs an occasional scoop of ice cream.

  I suppose everyone does.

  Why does life end like this?  Why can't life end with great pleasure and enjoyment?  The wrinkled skin that turns to broken breath is not the way to culminate a life.  And yet this is what we have.
  I think once you get to be 50 years old, you should start getting younger and feeling better and looking younger till you die looking great.
  Oh well, just a thought.