The Promise

The Promise
Mother was a dynamic, caring and hard-working woman all of her life. She spent every day working, either on the farm or in the house looking after Dad and me. She never complained about her lot in life or about the things she didn’t have. She just did what she had to do and carried on from day to day, always living in the shadow of my father who was the provider, the decision maker and always unquestionably the head of the house. She was born in small town Ontario in 1913, and always lived within ten miles of her place of birth. She had two older brothers who were sixteen and eighteen years older than Mom, both of whom predeceased her by many years. At the time of her death Mom, as far as anyone could determine, had lived longer than anyone in her family.

It was sad to watch her mind failing her and to watch the slow downhill slide. By the age of ninety she no longer remembered where she lived, or what day it was. Things like the seasons seemed to have lost all meaning to her. One day I was sitting on the front porch with her enjoying just about the nicest day we’d had all summer when she asked me if I had all my Christmas shopping done. I hoped she was making a little joke, but really knew better. I just laughed and said, “No.”

“Well,” she said, “You’d better get at it because those kids will need presents under the tree tomorrow morning.”

We had to laugh at those little things, because if we didn’t life would soon have become an unbearable string of tragedies for us. We also needed to find the humor in those situations that threatened to make us angry. It would have been so easy to get angry sometimes and I must admit that I lost my patience more than once, but Brenda was always there with a smile and a loving touch to calm me down and help me see things clearly.

Bren is the real hero in our house. Once all the kids were off to school, Brenda started her own business. She was good at it and worked hard every day. Before long it started to show good results and soon she was on her way. She gave up that fast growing and extremely profitable business, to fulfill a promise that she made to Dad. He had asked her to make sure that neither he nor Mom were ever put into a nursing home. Being the perfect daughter-in-law, she agreed and her future was set in stone. You see my wife would never knowingly break a promise. I never knew about her promise to Dad until after he died in 2000 of a sudden heart attack.

At that time Mom was already failing and was, in fact, in the hospital with a broken hip. She was certainly in no condition to look after herself when she was released so we moved her in with us. Brenda immediately shut down her business and became a full time care-giver to Mom.

Even before Dad passed away we had been working on selling their house, and moving into a house with a “granny flat” so they wouldn’t be alone. We had put in, and had accepted, an offer on a nice house in the country that already had a “granny flat” but needed a bit of attention outside. Brenda and I had already arranged for a mortgage in our name to pay the difference between the cost of the new house and the value of Dad and Mom’s house. The problem was that during this whole process the house we were renting was sold and we were told that we would have to vacate as the new owners were going to demolish it and turn the lot back into farm land. Then Dad died. To us, the logical thing to do was to move into Mom and Dad’s house until it sold rather than keep Mom in strange surroundings and throw rent away month after month, until we were finally told to move. We moved for the first time in thirteen years.

We had, for the last few years, spent quite bit of time with Mom and Dad and I had often told Dad to shush for saying, right in front of Mom, how badly she was failing. When we moved into their house, we quickly began to realize what he had meant. We had thought that he was referring to her physical condition, but he hasn’t. He had been concerned about her mind. We hadn’t noticed before, but she couldn’t remember the things that we all take for granted. Things like her address, her date of birth, what day
it was, or even what time of day it was. She could sit and carry on a great conversation with you and chances where you wouldn’t notice anything wrong, but when you were around her constantly you started to notice certain inconsistences. I’ve been told that many older people learn to cover up this condition and Mom was very good at it.

We began to notice lots of little things that you wouldn’t pick up on unless you were with her twenty-four hours a day. Things like the fact that every time Bren asked her if she would like some help to take a shower or to wash her hair, she would always say she had just done that yesterday, when we knew for a fact that she hadn’t. She would when no one was looking, and at a totally inappropriate time, half peel some potatoes and put them on the stove to cook with no water. Bren would smell smoke and come to the rescue.

It was more of a full time job keeping an eye on Mom than it had been looking after six kids. We didn’t have a choice though. We stayed together until Mom died in her ninety-second year. Bren had made a promise and that was the end of that. Mom was with us until the day she died, and she will remain in our hearts forever.