If Wishes Were Fishes. . .
February 17, 2008
I have now seen two robins sitting in the cottonwood tree in our backyard. Not at the same time, to be sure but I know that I am not seeing the same one because one is quite a bit bigger than the other. In my opinion they are here way too early especially during a winter as cold and snowy as this one has been. They sit there looking like little round balls with their feathers all fluffed up around them as they try to survive the bitter cold. I keep trying to send a telepathic message to them, “Go south for a few more weeks; the strawberry patch you are staking out isn’t worth dying for”. But of course, they can’t hear me, and even if they did I doubt that they would listen. Thankfully, thus far, they have survived.
We continue to survive as well, although MGH is continuing to lose a little more ground physically each year, as he finds at 80 years of age that his spirit is very much trapped by his aging body. Much of his energy is devoted now to doing the things that allow him to continue living in his own home. He looks at me with sadness as he says, “I love to be clean. I have always enjoyed my shower but now I dread it. If I don’t get up and take it first thing in the morning I know it will not get done because I won’t have the energy later in the day.” Every shower he takes now has become a battle for him. Standing in the shower has made way for sitting on a plastic stool and so it will go as the ability to do retreats in small ways until almost without realizing it one’s world has narrowed into the smallest of spaces the last being one’s bed.
Bryant W. told MGH that when President Hinckley reached the point where he couldn’t as he put it in his pragmatic way, “put on his shoes and go to work” his family arranged for a hospital bed to be placed in the front room of his apartment to make it easier to care for him. Upon seeing this bed set up in the same place as it had been for his wife Marjorie before she died, he refused to sleep in it saying if he were going to die he would prefer to do it in his own bed and stomped off to his bedroom. In the end the wishes of his family prevailed and he acquiesced to their desires.
When I was delivering papers in DeForest in the early 90’s part of my route took me to an apartment building. Quite often the curtains were open on one of the ground floor apartments. It was impossible not to see what was happening, not that it amounted to much. The room was always dark except for the flickering light coming from a television. Slumped on the couch in front of the television was a heavy set man smoking a cigar, the fumes snaking their way under the door into the hallway leaving an unpleasant, rank odor as I made my way past. His body language screamed depression and I always wondered what his problem was. Why was he up so early because in my world anyone with any sense at all who didn’t have to be up wouldn’t be. I was younger then. Now, I know and apologize for my scornful thoughts. Life had passed him by and he was simply trying to do what the Bible euphemistically calls ‘enduring to the end”.
My mother used to say that she didn’t want to get old and go through all the suffering that so often accompanies one’s advancing years. She died at the age of 48 which I, at age 25, thought was old but by the time I reached that age myself I had changed my mind. When I would mention this desire of mother’s to MGH his response was always the same. “You need to be careful what you pray for.”
“Don’t wish your life away” is another bit of wisdom MGH passed on to me early in our marriage. His father had given MGH this bit of advice when he expressed his concern about how he was going to provide for his family and pay for his college expenses as he began his studies at Utah State University. It would only be natural to want to get them behind him so he could get on with life not realizing that ‘life’ is where we are at the moment not somewhere in the future.
I think we all, at times, have wished for a particular period to be over so we could get on to the ‘good’ stuff. I can remember starting my third grade year, standing out on the playground during recess and thinking how long it would be before Christmas came and stretching out far, far away was the end of the school year in May. But the end finally came and so have many more since then and now instead of stretching out in what used to seem like an eternity I find the years whipping by me as if time itself has run amok and is rushing me forward whether I will or no. I can remember how I could hardly wait to grow up and go away to college leaving my family behind me with hardly a backward glance as the future beckoned and I, all impatient for what it held, moved eagerly toward it.
Now I sometimes find myself wishing I could go back to those times when life’s worries were carried by someone else. I find myself remembering kinder gentler times such as coming home from trips to visit mother’s family in Casa Grande and falling asleep in the car on the long drive home only to waken when the car stopped moving as we pulled into the driveway. Then ‘playing possum’ which is what my father called pretending to be asleep even though it meant waiting until my younger sisters, who really were asleep, were carried in ahead of me, so that he would pick me up and carry me into the house in his strong arms.
I remember how I could hardly wait to get married and then for children to arrive and suddenly, or so it seems, I find that I have been married for 46 years and those children I could hardly wait for have made me a grandmother and now their children have made me a great grandmother and I wonder at how quickly it has all happened.
Would the years have gone any slower if I had been more patient, more willing to enjoy the moment, less eager for the next milestone to be reached?
Have I learned anything from all this? I hope so. For one thing, now I am really, really careful about what I wish for. Considering what the future has in store, perhaps you can understand why.