As Another Page Turns…

It’s been one very long year.

Fifty two weeks ago, I moved into the apartment we’re living in now. It seems like a lifetime ago, yet the details surrounding that weekend are still fresh, at times somewhat raw.

Suzanna and I had lived for the previous three months with dear friends who had given us a wonderful home when we had nowhere else to go.

I was going to try to live as best I could independently, Suzanna was heading back to university. We had no idea that although I was struggling to move about (the one thing I wasn’t going to miss about our friends’ home was the staircase!), we didn’t anticipate how quickly my health would decline. By the end of December I was needing a wheelchair, on oxygen, and very close to being confined to bed due to weakness and pain.

Since last year I’ve lost my ability to walk more than a few steps at a time, can’t prepare food for myself (even swallowing is not always successful) and often need help with dressing. A few weeks ago Suzanna fashioned a way for me to pull myself out of bed with a belt, unable to lift myself up without assistance anymore.

There is so much that I’ve lost in this last year, a bitter pill to swallow for someone who has prided herself on being independent, resourceful and responsible. A lifetime of being the person who could be relied upon to come through in situations thick and thin.

It’s at times humiliating to need this degree of assistance, and to be needing more as each week goes by. This week I have a meeting (as has been the case for the last six months, here in my bedroom) with my doctor, case manager, lead nurse and my daughter as we try to figure out what’s best for both me and Suzanna. We have some disconcerting territory to cover, decisions to be reached over recent developments that we can no longer pretend aren’t as serious as they truly are.

That’s all more than enough reason for this past year to feel like it’s gone by very slowly.

But then, I look at other reasons for this year to have felt so long. Friendships lit, rekindled and nurtured. There are valued friends who have been a part of my life for many years, yet also new friends who came into our lives just in this past year – and in the best of ways feel like they’ve been around forever.

I’ve had the most incredible past four months with my daughter who paused her education to come home to look after me. It’s been easy to forget that she lived away from home for sixteen months in the last two years, our relationship certainly didn’t suffer for the miles that separated us. Despite the sadness that sits on us with her not returning to university with her friends this week, she assures me that she not for a second regrets her decision.

We know that this comes to an end, and we pack as much love as we possible can in this time together. It’s an unspoken commitment between us, squeezing in what we can of what the next thirty or forty more years ought to have been allowed to us. Life really sucks right now. We acknowledge it now and again, and then move on to appreciating that for now we still have this time together.

The hardest year of my life has also turned out to be the sweetest in so many ways. One very long year not because of the hardships, but because of just  how much care and love has been squeezed into it. I’m one very lucky dame.