The first 48 years of her
life were very hard and deprived under communism. When she arrived here in 1980,
she was so thin and malnourished - she looked like a skeleton, with sunken eyes
and pallid skin. She never returned to Romania except for brief visits. Her
life was so much easier here and my beautiful daughters became our lives and her
universe.
She looked back many times
on her decision, analyzing everything; sometimes she had regrets, missing her
siblings, but most of the time was happy to be free. She used to jump every
time there was a knock on the door. She thought it was the police looking for
her although she had done nothing wrong. She was re-living the totalitarian
state and the dreadful treatment of its citizens under the brutal regime of
Ceausescu.
She has fallen down a lot lately.
She has not broken anything but has gotten some nasty bruises that are slow to
heal. She still goes up and down stairs, making sure she does not miss a step.
Sometimes she passes out on the patio from the heat, self-induced dehydration,
or plain dizziness from old age. She is never thirsty or hungry. We remind her to
drink water and force her to eat with us.
We nicknamed her Lucy a
few years ago when she dyed her hair flaming red and the nickname stuck. Her
real name is Mimi but her grandchildren call her Maia, like the Roman goddess
of dew.
She used to move mountains
with her energy, tirelessly taking care of everyone’s needs but her own. She
gets frustrated because she is so slow now and her hands are weak and unsteady.
Lucy dreams often that her
legs will work again like they used to; she would visit her great grandson who
lives so far away; if he lived nearby, she could take care of him, she says,
instead of sending him to a nursery during the day. I am not sure, she would be
up for the challenge but the desire is still there.
Her eyes are as sharp as
ever. She complains that her cataract surgery 10 years ago was a total failure –
the doctor had no idea what he was doing. Yet she can thread a needle in no
time and make sewing repairs. I cannot even see to thread a needle with glasses
on and am several decades younger.
Lucy stopped doing her
masterful crocheting a decade ago. I don’t know why she stopped – her macramé
doilies were a work of art. Maybe she lost interest because nobody seemed to
appreciate what she created. There was a store in Starkville that loved her
work - she sold quite a few pieces over the years. It is sad that I’ve never
learned how to do it when she tried to teach me. I saw one of Lucy’s macramé
doilies on my daughter’s table when we visited. It surprised me and made me
happy – one young person appreciates hand-made beauty.
Most Americans no longer
understand or appreciate the painstaking art of counted-cross stitching, needle
pointing, knitting, or crocheting. Everything is done by machines, uniform and
without the creative flair of two gifted hands.
My cousin Mariana still
makes paintings with her tiny cross-stitch needle and canvas. You cannot tell,
it is not a painting, until you get up close to the picture. I bought several
of her pieces last year and she had them framed. It was difficult bringing them
back across two continents but it was worth it. The custom officers asked me
what they were. It is masterful beauty sewn by hand, I said, a lost art in the
U.S. They gave me strange looks and waved me on through.
Lucy tells me often that it
is going to rain during the night. She knows for sure because the moon has lost
all its water, it is a crescent moon. We laugh at her astronomical assessment,
but then a steady rain starts falling after midnight. Maybe it is coincidence
but it happens too many times.
Lucy refuses to go to the
doctor to have any more blood drawn. She read somewhere that she may be left
without blood if he draws too many vials of her precious blood. What if her
body can no longer produce it? She heard on her two favorite TV channels that
it may be true.
It breaks my heart to see
her so unsteady and her gait so shaky; she gets frustrated with herself and
refuses help sometimes. She is beginning to mix our names up but she can still
remember beautiful poetry from her childhood. She lives trapped between two
worlds, the old world she left behind 33 years ago and the current reality.
Watching constant TV from the old world, she often confuses events happening
there with events happening here.
She has not been able to
learn English; she just knew enough to get in trouble. The most memorable
incident was the wedding of a close friend. Mom commented to a guest she had
seen before, a rotund lady, “You look good, you so fat!” Mortified, I had to
explain to the lady that in our culture, being fat was a compliment. Communists
kept us so starved, food was rationed and very expensive, so if you were fat,
that meant that you were doing well economically, you could afford food on the
black market. She did not buy the story and avoided us like the plague. We
stopped making excuses for Lucy; we just file every new incident under “Lucy’s
hilarious pearls of wisdom.”
We sent Lucy to college
classes, our English professor neighbor offered to teach her, to no avail. She
would return from class frustrated, complaining of real or imagined headaches,
and vowing to go back to Romania. She depended 100 percent on us to translate
everything. We thought the birth of her granddaughters would force her to learn
English. Instead, she taught her granddaughters Romanian as soon as they
started to speak a few English words. They knew at an early age that Maia does
not speak English and what language everyone spoke. On daily walks, the oldest
granddaughter served as the official translator. As a three year old, she would stomp her foot
when anybody addressed mom in English – “Maia speak no English!” Embarrassed at
her plight, the teen-aged girls asked Lucy not to speak Romanian too loudly in
public. As they grew older, they were happy and proud that they knew another
language.
Lucy took her favorite
granddaughter on walks in the nearby cemetery – it was quiet, green, and
peaceful. Eileen would ask her with childish innocence and naiveté, “Grandma
when are you going to die so I can come visit you?”
Lucy can no longer travel
by plane to see her country, her brother and sister. She refuses to use a
wheelchair and it would be futile to try to catch a flight while walking so
painstakingly slow, she would never make it on time or people would knock her
over. Besides, she has become scared of leaving home for distances further than
the mall or her favorite neighborhood restaurant. She refuses to ride several hours to see her
great-grandchild – perhaps when she feels better, she says, but that day never
comes.
She talks to flowers and to
our 13 year old Snowshoe Siamese cat Bogart as if they understand Romanian.
Strangely though, Bogart still obeys her commands.
She still has the green
thumb to bring flowers back from the brink of death. I watched her pick
discarded dried roots intended for trash from the street; somehow she made a
beautiful green plant grow back. She has nursed so many gardens and so many of
us through the years! It frustrates her that she can no longer care for herself
much less for us.
We know when she breaks
something when we step on shards of glass or we look for the 20 year old
crockpot with glass cover and find a strange metal lid on it. When we leave for
a few hours, we know, when we return, she has already rearranged something in
the house that did not suit her tastes.
I watch her struggle to
wash her cup and teaspoon which she insists on doing and it makes me sad. She
talks about past events with clarity as if they happened yesterday. She still
talks to her younger brother and it makes her happy as if he is right there
with her.
Lucy’s world is so much
smaller now, the house, the deck, and the patio. Tiny things in life, that we
are too busy and too tired to notice, make her happy – the hummingbird in
flight collecting nectar from her begonias, the deer that wonder into our back
yard in the afternoon and eat the flowering tomatoes, the occasional fox that
chases Bogart to our back door, the resident beaver in the nearby pond
collecting twigs, the pair of Canadian geese that fly in and graze at the ridge
of our yard, and the perfumed blooms of her favorite rose bush.
Lucy is still full of life
on the inside but her body is failing her and so is the scant and careless medical
care she receives – she is too old, they say. But I still see the vibrant,
young Lucy who raised and loved so many of us, never asking for anything in
return. I am thankful to God that I still have my devoted mom.
No comments:
Post a Comment