Friend #24 - Betty

A long time friend, who is the general manager of an assisted living facility, suggested that since I was making new friends, I should come and visit some of the residents at her facility…and I thought, “What a great idea!”  When I was a kid, my church group regularly visited a nursing home just up the street.  Where had that habit gone?  I couldn’t remember.  But it’s been years since I’ve heard of anyone visiting the elderly.

It took a while to coordinate on my part but I finally found a time that would work.  My friend, Amey, greeted me, took me on a tour of the facility and told me she knew just who I should meet.  Eventually, she stood in the doorway of one of the rooms, introduced me to Betty and then she was gone.  I walked into the dimly lit room and smiled at the woman sitting in a wheelchair.  She asked me to pardon the mess.  She’d just moved in.  She told me that she’d apparently had a stroke. 

“You mean you don’t know?” I said, teasing.

She shook her head. 

I asked her if she remembered it.  She said no.

Betty told me that she was ninety-four-years-old and that she had been married to her husband, Stan, for seventy-two years.  She met Stan when she was fourteen years old in her Iowa hometown.  They married when she was nineteen because Stan was going off to the war.  Normally, her parents wouldn’t have agreed to let her get married so young but they knew they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if anything ever happened to Stan.  Luckily, it didn’t.  Betty and Stan had two sons once the war was over.  Stan worked in a department store.  Betty started out as a cashier but eventually worked her way into an advertising job, managing the advertising for Best Western in the 1970’s.

I told Betty I worked in advertising.  She grinned in delight.  “We have so much in common!”

I kept asking Betty questions, just like I do everyone but Betty seemed to fade between the answers, as if she were having difficulty remembering.  I wondered if that stroke had caused more damage than I could see on the outside.  Stan died a year ago last December.  After Betty’s stroke, her sons thought it best that she receive round the clock care, which is how she ended up in the assisted living home.  One of her sons lives in Colorado.  The other lives in California.  They call…but their lives are elsewhere.

As I sat looking at Betty, I realized I was witnessing a woman who had lived beyond her life.  The love of her life, the man she’d grown together with like two intertwining trees, was gone.  The home they built together had been swept away by her stroke.  The children she raised were off raising their own.  Just when Betty had reached a point in her life when she no longer desired change, her entire life was turned upside down and she found herself living in the assisted living home where I found her.

I asked her how she liked the other people in the facility.  Betty said the women were very private and hard to get to know.  She described one woman, Edith, who never speaks to Betty but always smiles.  Betty said she remembers Edith’s name because Edith was her mother’s name.  Once Betty told one of the nurses that Edith needed her meat cut up and Edith had looked particularly grateful.  I asked Betty if, perhaps, Edith had been rendered mute because of a stroke.  I could tell she hadn’t considered that possibility.  It may have fallen into one of those bruised places in Betty’s brain. 

There was silence amongst us for a while.  To fill the space, I began to babble on about my own life, something I try not to do when visiting someone new, but old, nervous ticks are hard to break.  At first I didn’t realize what was happening, but my words poured over Betty like water bringing a wilted plant back to life.  It was then that I realized that Betty didn’t need to recount her own story.  She’d done that for ninety-four years.  She was tired of that story.  The story that mattered to her…was mine. 

The charades of my own life brought animation to the dimly lit room and when I left, I knew I’d done a good deed.  Sometimes, life brings all of us moments when we feel down and the best way to escape those negative thoughts is to focus on happier ones.  There aren’t a lot of happy thoughts in Betty’s life right now.  The kindest thing I could do was to give her some of mine.  And so I did.