Mama Chan In Her Chair

My mother lives in an assisted-living home on the outskirts of Los Angeles. My dad’s gone now and my mom has a lot of medical conditions that make it where she really can’t live on her own. It’s a really messed up situation, because we don’t like that she can’t live in her own house, the house she built with my father and where he spent his final days with her. It wasn’t any kind of easy decision, but she is better than she’s been in a very very long time.

One of the hardest things about her situation is that she’s still a relatively young woman to be in one of these places. She’s only 60-years old. Just last week we joined her and the rest of the ladies (it’s a ladies only home) for the 96th birthday celebration of her roommate. She’s surrounded by old, tired, sometimes mentally unstable women. My mom can’t be alone, but she’s a very alert and very alive individual. It’s that part that makes it so hard to have  to have her living there.

At the same time, the place makes me think of my own old age to come. I look at these old women, quietly passing the hours with nothing but some aides and each other to keep them company. Family comes and goes but never for long enough. I don’t even manage to make more than a weekly trip of a couple of hours to see my own mom. Sometimes some of the ladies go without a visit for weeks on end. I begin to wonder if that is all that we all have to look forward to. I begin to wonder if you just go as hard and as far as you can to just get to a day where all you can do is just wait for the inevitable to take you. I see my mother, so young compared to all these women and I feel such guilt that she’s stuck watching them wait out the end that won’t come for a long long time for her. And then, when one of those women does pass from this world to the next, I hurt for her loss – as if losing my father and being made to live away from her home wasn’t already enough, now she has to watch the people she spends every lonely day with leave her as well.

I pray my end either comes early or quickly or both if this is all there is to look forward to.