*LEAVE TAKING*

People rarely leave us all at once - I believe that leave-taking is a slow process because handling it all at once would be far too painful. When my mother died over a year ago at the age of 83 I became aware that she really had began leaving us several years previously. There were the almost imperceptible changes in her habits and her personality that went unnoticed for a long while, only noticeable as a pattern really, in retrospect. There was a shrinking process where she began to inhabit less and less of her home. She gave up her bedroom upstairs and began her life on the daybed in her living room, a small distance from the kitchen table where she would eat her meals and watch the world go by out of her kitchen window. She then became dependent on others such as the doctor she loved who made home visits, the almost daily short visits from my brother to check on her after he quit working, occasional visits from a visiting nurse that her doctor had ordered, the visits from her grandaughter Leslie and her great-grandaughter who would clean her house or weed her garden weekly.
Eventually we all noticed that it was becoming impossible for her to live alone - after she had burned food once too often, after we discovered spoiled food in the refrigerator and confusion over her medication, after she had fallen one too many times. We probably should have intervened sooner, but like lovers sad to see the morning come, we were reluctant to part with our image of the woman we loved and admired.
But our intervention wasn't required because her health intervened and her scaled down life became one of a hospital bed. That move from the house that she had lived in for so many years, the home she had worked so hard to pay for, the garden she had tended lovingly, the birds and animals that she had fed over the years, must have seemed like a death to her. After the hospital, for a short time her life continued to shrink when she moved into a nursing home and shared a room with another lady. A room where she could no longer have her prized possessions, her birds, her cat. She tried to adjust and eventually took comfort in the narrowness of her orbit. Then came the night she had breathing difficulties and was taken to an even smaller hospital where she required the use of a breathing tube down her throat and an intensive care unit where the lights were on night and day and eventually the placement of a feeding tube. She could no longer speak nor enjoy the thing she loved most, eating. Everything went downhill from then as her world continued to shrink. Eventually she was allowed her release from this life to go to another world where she could be with the family who preceded her and have all the space in the heavens to roam freely...................................

I have come to understand that this leave-taking is something we must all do constantly by the time we read mid-life. Perhaps this is what the midlife crisis is all about - we occupy our youth with getting 'things', acquiring and spending, climbing to the top of the hill, only to realize that the downward slope of the hill on the other side is littered with things that just slip away. Not just things slip away - people, too, begin to slip away at an alarming rate once we reach our 40s and 50s. How can we ever be ready. Our clinging - to youth, to perfect vision, to stamina - only makes the leave-taking awkward and painful.