daughters

There's more. There always seems to be more. Once you begin to see the story of it all, the willingness of the aged to tell the tale, there is nothing but story, and in between, paperwork. Frances Lee's mother sits in a wheeled recliner during her waking hours. She yells, over and over again for her daugher and for water. She can only drink thickened liquids, so her question is never answered, her thirst never quenched. Her daughter visits almost every day. They are from Kansas, the Kansas of long ago, with prairie-straight hair, parted in the middle and wound into braids that sit on either side of her head like Danish. If you listen, you can tell their hair used to be red. She was telling me a story about her mother becasue her mother is sitting in the chair dying, and I'm new, and she hasn't told it to me yet. She warns me that she never shuts up, but living among the dying, I've learned to end conversations. She tells me about her grandfather, on mama's side, and " his big cavalry moustache and long red hair." How he fathered thirteen children with an invalid wife (ya think?), and raised them all. She tells me about all of the children in her mother's family, how one of the 13 was murdered while she was walking home after a bingo game. I was kind of surprised to learn that they played bingo during the depression, but I guess life goes on. They shot her through one eye and she lived for awhile. She reminded me that back in those days, they didn't keep you in the hospital if they expected you to die--they sent you home. And they made her mother sleep on the sofa so Mary could die in her bed, and all she remembers is that the cat had kittens that night. That's the story Frances Lee's mother told her, handed down to her, and she tells me so I'll know a little of her mother, the woman she was before she was taken by Alzheimer's. She's back-woodsy--Frances Lee is. Could have stepped out of the cast of Deliverance. She doesn't understand medication. Calls them magic pills. She's old herself. Her mother must be a hundred.

So that's the story for today.