Year Twenty: Seams That Can't Be Mended (Memoir)

My Grandma was a jolly, fun woman who loved to laugh. When I was in my second year of university, she was in her 90s, and her health failed. Dementia began to set in. She could no longer live alone in her apartment.

Mom brought Grandma to live with her. But Mom was still teaching, supporting me at university as well as herself, and couldn't stay home to look after Grandma.

In an age when women did not work outside the home, my mother had been raised to feel it was shameful to send one's aging relatives away to a "home" to be cared for by strangers. Good, decent descendants took their kin in and cared for them at home. A string of women paraded through our house, hired by my mother to stay with Grandma while Mom was at work. They repeatedly got better jobs, failed to show up, called in sick just before Mom left for work... It was a nightmare for my mother.  Finally, she had to admit defeat--failure, I'm sure she called it to herself, though no one else did--and place Grandma in a nursing home. She visited her there every day, and I visited her whenever I was home from University.

Here's a picture of my Grandma on her 100th birthday shortly before she passed away.

What I remember about all this, is my Mother's heartache over Grandma's failing health, the look on her face as she watched Grandma, nodding off in the armchair in the living room after dinner. I watched Mom knitting the shrug Grandma's wearing in this photo, late at night as we watched TV before bed, and the image stayed with me - of Mom trying to ward off the cold of Grandma's approaching death.  I wrote:

MENDING

You watch her
wearing her last days,
and late at night
I hear you
scrubbing, patching, darning
the worn fabric
of her years.

Again tonight
while she nodded in shadows,
your troubled eyes
examined her
seeking the fault
in your mending.