It's No Good...

"It's no good, David, just no good to get this old." I stood by my maternal grandmother's nursing home bed, and she told me that. She was in her mid 90s and miserable. This was back in the mid 80s, not long before she died.

I was never close to Anna, but always treated her with respect. My mother revered her, and always explained how wise she was. I never saw it myself. First, she had an awful combination of a mumbling way of speaking and a heavy Yiddish accent, so I never got more than about 30% of what she said. And, for most of her life, she depended on the charity of 4 of her 5 kids to live (the 5th family were abject losers who barely supported themselves) so I always questioned the "wisdom" of someone who had ended up that way...

So there I was, in my mid 20s, hearing her tell me how she wished she were dead. I didn't know how to respond to her repeated declarations about how bad it was to be so old, so I think I said "Well Grandma, I'm sorry you're so old."

Her words haunted me today, as I spend the better part of a day with my own mother, who turns 90 in April. Wifey, my sister Trudy, and brother in law Dennis took her to the Dermatologist today, to see about a bleeding growth on her foot.

IT turned out the growth was a Kaposi's sarcoma, a common lesion among the elderly. The laconic doc, a Miami Beach native who looked and spoke like Donald Sutherland, zapped the thing off, and told Mom to follow up with her podiatrist for wound care. Afterwards we went to lunch.

But Mom's going south faster than slower. On the drive to the office, she showed a nastiness about the fact that it took 10 days to get in to see the specialist "I wonder if HIS mother has to wait so long..." She forgot that she no longer drove, lamenting that the wait for treatment of her foot meant she "couldn't drive anywhere last week."

Her manner is starting to change, I fear. She's always been sweet, and I'm worried that, like her mother, she may be souring a bit.

She vehemently insists she stay in her condo. She made a huge deal about getting her one of those "I've fallen and can't get up" alarm buttons, and now refuses to wear the activator around her neck.

Wifey and I talked about her on the long drive home to Miami. Wifey, always the optimist about her and her condition, reminded me that she could be MUCH worse. I know that's so, but I can't get my mother's mother's portentious words out of my head: "It's just no good."