I have been absent from my blogging world for nearly a month. A holiday you say? Hardly. I’ve been in Colorado helping out my older sister who had a catastrophic fall, breaking her hip. One little tilt, a wobble not recovered, an older frail woman with other contributing health issues loses her balance and a major disruption settles into her life…and mine as well. Suddenly a medical proxy, signed over 20 years ago, has a surgeon asking my permission for my sister to have a hip operation. “She will not survive without it,” he claims. “She will not be able to get up, pneumonia could easily be contracted. No operation will result in sure death.” Whew!
By the time I got to Colorado my sister had been in re-hab for a week. For awhile there was hope she’d be able to return to her apartment in a senior’s independent living complex. But hope gave way to reality - she had to move somewhere where she could get assistance with daily living. My sister could not wrap her mind around this fact. She wanted to “go home” to her apartment. She still does.
While she remained in re-hab, trying to stand, trying to walk, and having a hard time staying positive, I began searching for a place for her, touring facilities from nursing homes, to assisted living apartments, to what is referred to as “memory care”. At night I began packing her possessions. One fact was clear, she would have to downsize to a one bedroom apartment, to a studio apartment, or possibly to what is essentially a hospital room. Just 8 months ago she moved from her large house to this two bedroom suite. That move was difficult, a hard decision for her to make, a life’s worth of accumulated memories filling every nook and cranny of the home she’d lived in for decades. Eight months, such a short time.
So I did my best to keep what would be cosy and familiar and find places to distribute the rest, making judgement calls on what should be kept and what should not. It was not a role I enjoyed. I had help though, lots of it, both in hard work and understanding. My sister has a fine group of friends. A cousin even showed up from back east. I couldn’t have managed without them.
For now things are doing okay. I’m home. My sister’s in her new home. Our connection for now is the phone.
While I was in Colorado a young friend was in a terrible vehicle accident. What a difference that day is making for her. Yesterday another friend fell down the stairs and is now in hospital, and another was in a motorcycle accident also with life changing results.
What can a person do when life flips over like this? Some would say pray, but prayer is passive. It puts the shoe on the other foot, a foot not even of this world. So what do we do? We rally - as the one directly affected, as a family member, as a friend, as a community. We rally because we must, because life is sometimes hard. We rally because we love our friends, our families, our community. We do whatever we can do. We do the best we can.
