She wakes up this morning, the first morning of 2009, in a new bedroom, in a new apartment, in a building in Baltimore County that she never saw until a few weeks ago. She moved in on Tuesday. She is starting fresh in the winter of her 85th year.
Brand new years bring anxiety to many of us. It all feels like uncharted territory out there, doesn’t it? Couldn’t we send out an advance scouting party, to see what fates might be lurking along the horizon, and get back to us so we can decide if we want to press on?
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She never imagined herself in a place such as this new apartment, but this is where she’s arrived. We give them fancy names now, but everybody knows what they are: old-age homes. She walked into the new place this week and looked at the scores of men and women with their graying pates and their fine pleated skins, and she saw the reflection of her own years.
She thought she could deny time forever. She keeps giving it a good fight. She was married to a man for 45 years, and then he had a heart attack and died at 66. She pressed on. She’s lived alone for the last two decades, mostly mocking the calendar with her energy and her passion, though not always.
Three years ago she had a stroke. She spent several days in a coma and several more fighting her way out of it like a woman clawing her way out of the very earth. The doctors said she wouldn’t make it. One-half of one percent chance of survival, they said.
They got it all wrong. She’s one tough cookie. As she struggled her way back to consciousness, she kept muttering about a granddaughter’s upcoming wedding. She was going to go, she insisted. The wedding was only weeks away, in Florida. Everybody said the idea was preposterous.
She went. Then, slowly, she went back to her normal life: living on her own, driving everywhere, doing her own shopping. She goes swimming several times a week. She volunteers at a local library. She reads voraciously, argues politics and religion and the great issues of the day.
She knows Dylan Thomas’s lines: “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
But three months ago she stood on a step stool to get something from the top of her refrigerator and fell backwards. She damaged her back. Spinal stenosis, the doctors called it. For weeks, the pain was pretty bad. She couldn’t get around, couldn’t do her own shopping, couldn’t do her volunteer work.
She wondered aloud if it might be time to give herself a break, to find a home where the basics were handled by others, a place where she might make new friends to replace those who’d slipped away through the years.
So this morning she starts the new year in her new place. She walked into the building Tuesday like a kid on her first day at a new school. This is her 85th year on earth, but the childhood anxieties linger: Would she feel comfortable in the new surroundings? Would she get along with the new kids? Would she have somebody to sit with at mealtime?
At dinner on Tuesday, there was a familiar face: a lady named Rose, who once lived on Marmon Avenue in northwest Baltimore. The two of them embraced. They’ve known each other for half a century.
“How long have you been here?”
“Seven years,” said Rose. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”
Then a lady named Gladys stopped by her table and introduced herself.
“It can be scary,” said Gladys.
“Yes, it is scary. It’s all so new, so confusing.”
“I want you to call me if you have any questions at all,” said Gladys.
As they talked, they discovered they’d grown up near each other — 200 miles from here, in the Bronx. They’d both lived on the Grand Concourse. They knew each other’s high schools, their surrounding streets. Now, so many years later, they were back sharing a neighborhood.
Then a man named Mel stopped by her table. He reminded her there was a New Year’s Eve party. She should know that she’s welcome, she’s part of the gang now.
The words arrived like an embrace. She’s like any of us, trying to feel upbeat as the new year arrives, trying to be brave as time takes its toll.
She will rage against time, because this is what she does. She is scared, but tougher than she knows. In the winter of her 85th year, she starts fresh. She is full of hope. She is indomitable. She is my mother.
