I was at the mailbox one day when my neighbor Edna, my older Filipino friend, pulled up alongside me in her car. As I leaned on the doorframe to talk, Edna took my hand and asked me about my mom. I found it kind of odd at first. As a grown woman, few hold my hand anymore; just my husband or the kids now and then. I took it as a cultural thing for the time being, knowing how important family is to my friend. Edna knew that my mom had been going through a myriad of health problems, especially after seeing an ambulance in my driveway so often; ten times to be exact the last year of her life alone. So here I am, hanging out in the street, cars passing by, holding hands with Edna.
As any caregiver can tell you, it’s an emotional rollercoaster to care for someone you love who has multiple health problems. It’s hard to keep balance in life when varying health services are in and out of the house day after day, and when more importantly, you don’t know if your mom will be ‘here’ from one week to the next. Or, for me, how many mornings I would wake up in a fog trying to quickly plan my day and recall whether my mom was downstairs, or in a hospital or rehab during the initial minutes of waking up. How would I manage the kids and be available to update the visiting nursing staff? How would I visit a rehab a half hour away and get back in time for their bus? And worse, what was I going to do without my mom?
No matter who you are or how old you are, it can be hard to cope with the illness and potential loss of a parent. It’s an ongoing, impending dread you try to learn to live with, but often it’s more like an emotional juggling act; the sadness, the guilty anger of not being available to do certain things, the pre-grief, the trying to maintain some hope in light of latest medical developments, the empathy you feel for a parent in pain. Some days it’s easier to manage the emotion of it all if you’ve slept enough. Other days it’s just a bear. Usually with an illness, you have an idea of how long it will last. If it’s cancer, the doctor will give you certain time frames and so forth. For us, this went on for years and years. If it wasn’t congestive heart failure, it was a stroke, or kidney failure, or the time the nurse woke her as she began to enter a diabetic coma. My mom suffered so much.
Friends try to help – thank God for those friends. However, unless you have to go home to this emotional drag race every single night, you don’t really get it. There’s an expression of sleeping with one eye open, but it’s really sleeping with one ear open. Luckily we did this, so to speak, and were able to hear my mom call us right before she could hardly breathe. When a loved one is in a care center, you know there is ‘staff’ of some sort to help. However when you are the only ‘staff’ available, there is a constant cloud of worry you feel. No friend can know all this or any other issue that we each have going on. And usually, if a friend is aware of a specific crisis, she will bring a dish of some sort or make some extra phone calls, but when your home is in perpetual crisis, the help kind of stops.
However, touch is primal. Look at an infant in the NICU. The best thing for them is to lay skin to skin. As these infants get older, all they want to do is hug or sit on you to watch Paw Patrol. After school, they hold your hand to cross a street or when they’re scared. By teens, they might hold hands with a partner for comfort, but the whole comfort of hand-holding starts slipping away, yet is still needed at times in my opinion.
A year or so later, I was in yet another rehab facility for my mom. I didn’t know if she’d leave this time. I never knew, but some times appeared worse than others. Sometimes she wouldn’t know us briefly due to a stroke yet she would always turn the corner and get a bit better while slowly slipping away in other ways. She survived more strokes and episodes of congestive heart failure and kidney failure than anyone I know. As I waited in the hallway during a doctor evaluation, my friend Edna stopped by. She ‘happened’ to be bringing in a patient of her own. Immediately, she came over to ask me what happened. She took my hand as she listened intently.
How often, anymore, does someone take the time to comfort another? Often I see people respond with ‘prayers’ to a Facebook posting asking for prayer or comfort of some sort. How often does a friend come over just to sit and comfort another? Here Edna was in the middle of her work day simply holding hands with me outside my mom’s room as we contemplated together what the future would hold for my mom and what we could do. Stretchers passed by. Nurses hustled past. Equipment dinged. And there’s me and Edna, holding hands quietly in the middle of all of it. At a time when my husband was at work and my mom couldn’t hold my hand as she was going through so much else in this world, life sent me Edna.
Edna’s brand of love and concern doesn’t come in the form of a fundraiser, a Hallmark card, or Facebook post. Her brand is not time-consuming or attention-seeking. Her brand is simple expression.
When we think of a parent and a child, often we ‘see’ them side by side holding hands, or a mom holding a baby – visually a standard image comes to mind; one of connection, comfort, and love. When we observe older people, often one will pat the other on the arm or shoulder, again expressing affection and connection, reaching out to each other. I grow to appreciate this more and more each year.
Finally, the day came when I had to stop by and share the news of my mom’s passing with Edna. I knocked on her door. She and her husband welcomed me in to their sitting room. They knew what I was going to say and stopped what they were doing. They didn’t give me a hug at the door and send me on my way. Instead, Edna took my hand and just listened and was so kind. I told her how fortunate I was to hold my mom’s hand as she passed. My brother did too. Death is scary for many of us, but having someone nearby helps ease it a bit, at least I would hope. Edna offered to help in any way she could. But there was nothing I needed her to do other than listen for just a few minutes and hold my hand one last time.
