When you place someone you love into a nursing home, the beginning is a blur. You don’t notice any of the other residents or their relatives; you don’t notice the staff. You fill out the forms and you answer the questions about incontinence and constipation and immobility with a gentle smile on your faked face. You cry secretly and often but you become very good at hiding your ongoing, endless grief behind an enormous smile….
…. until you meet someone who is experiencing the same kind of thing with her wonderful, but ailing, mother. N is the most amazingly resilient woman I have ever met. She ‘lives’ two doors down from Anthony’s room and she has the most beautiful laugh and the most poignant cry.
It only seems a moment ago that we were all playing a game of ‘Memory’ in the dining room – N, her daughter, Ants and me. Sometimes we were joined by others; sometimes we were asked to move to another room because our raucous laughter was too loud; now both N and Ants are too incapacitated to partake in such games except in a pretend kind of way.
These two wonderful people, Ants and N, survive and embrace each moment of each day with a kind of stoic acceptance. And, within the tragedy of our ongoing grief, N’s daughter and I have become friends.
This friendship means the world to me because it is forged in the steel of our shared heartbreak. Thank you, Shaz
jmgoyder 