The fading good moments

Story by Brianne Grebil

The windows of “good” moments have grown shorter and less frequent. I’ve begun to settle for moments that aren’t bad.

I still get to steal a few quiet moments with her in the afternoon, after lunch. We sit on the couch and I hold her hand. For a short while, she stops crying and begging to go home (even though she’s in the house she’s lived in for 40 years). For now, she’s stopped hating me for having the audacity to bathe and dress her after she’s had an accident (which she is always unaware of).

Sixty seven. She’ll be 67 in November. I look at her while she stares at nothing and I can’t help wonder what it would be like to have a 67 year old mother, rather than be mother to a 67 year old.

Sometimes, it’s deeply ok. I find a peace and privilege in caring for her, and depths of love I had previously not known. Without illness, I would not have held her hand so much. I would not have searched for love somewhere else, and found the purist kind.

Sometimes, it’s really not ok. There is rage. It’s all so profoundly unfair. And there is shame and guilt. Why did it take illness for me to hold her hand so much? She would have liked that in the days when she knew who it was that held her hand.

But this is life, and I am here for it. I am here for it all. How beautiful that I have a heart to break. I am here to lay the fragments at her feet, so that we both can see that wasn’t where love was anyway.