Ten-Finger Exercises

grief group

Next week will be the last week of our grief group. It's gone well. We had one man drop out, for which we were thankful. He wasn't ready to listen to anything but his own sad tale, and however sad it truly is, group members have to be able to support each other, or at least listen attentively. A woman came the following week and took his place, so we came out okay in numbers. Five is a small group, but a workable size, and people became close and talked easily.

The group is held, I may have mentioned, in the apartment building we moved my mother into when we first brought her over here from her home in Kennewick. Tonight, since I was early even to set up, I let myself feel what it was like, putting in the pass code and going through those doors every night.

I was always there with a mixture of feelings. If I came for lunch, I had to hurry back to work. Usually I came after work and fixed supper for her. My most intense feeling was sadness. The apartment was brand new, a decent size for her I thought. Her furniture was a tight fit because she couldn't decide to leave anything else out. She really couldn't decide much of anything. She hardly knew where she was, and where she had lived before. Her house, where she and Daddy had moved to from Atlanta fifteen years before, was just a hole in her mind. Pictures of it looked familiar if one of us was in the picture too, but she couldn't quite place the location.

She missed out on the joy of seeing her mother's red Oriental rug look perfect in her new living room. She missed out on having a patio with a view of the fountain below and the mountains in the distance. She didn't really notice any of it.

For years she had been making us a perfect Sunday dinner, week after week, only the entree changing from pot roast to salmon to maybe meatloaf. I forget. Suddenly I was cooking the meals in her apartment, and Bill would come and eat with us. This was the same mother who barely let me in the kitchen except to dish up the salad, set the table, fill the glasses with ice water. Suddenly she had trouble remembering how to work her microwave, and ate a lot of cereal and toast when I wasn't there.

It still makes me incredibly sad to remember how lost she was in a new place, and I wonder again and again if it was really the best thing to do. But what else could I have done, you ask? That's what we all say, except the ones who choose to do something else. Like the three sisters who are giving full time care to their brother with Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease. They have jobs and families too, but they're managing. And the daughter who came all the way across the country to tell her mother she forgave her so that the mother could die in peace, and stayed for a month expecting it to happen.

I'm not at all convinced I couldn't have done better by her, somehow helping her stay in the familiar territory of her own home. But, as I think of it, she didn't have a terminal diagnosis then. She just had Parkinsons and was becoming demented, little by little. So, although I might have stayed with her and gotten some live-in help, I probably wouldn't have thought to do it so early. Still, she lived another four years. Sigh. I guess I couldn't have done it differently after all. But maybe, live-in help....

For our final week we are all supposed to bring a food the person who died really liked, and eat together. I'm thinking. I don't think salmon would be a good choice. Probably salad. We had a green salad every Sunday, with peeled tomatoes and oil and vinegar dressing. That would be okay for the Adventists in our group.

I'll close this off before the hour turns, then maybe come back and add a video that I thought was really good. Serious, but good. If I can find it in time.