Her Falls, or (Not) Navigating the Terrain 

 

This one wasn’t anything, really. Clutching the green tomatoes she’d just picked for a pie for her husband, she went to step back onto the patio but her foot caught on the concrete edge. “Gotta keep my head up,” she told herself on the way down. “I can’t hit the patio with my head.”

“Go get Dad,” she called to son Phil in the living room, tomatoes all around her. He’d come to the cottage to visit.

She doesn’t think she made the pie.

This second one, she was watching helicopter rides at a fundraiser event down the road from the retirement complex. Standing under a tree at the edge of the field, she was getting tired. She propped herself against the trunk for a bit, then decided to head back to the auction tent. A twig on the ground, though, caught her notice. It might cause somebody to trip. She smacked her foot down on it to break it—and suddenly dizzy, she crumpled.

“Are you okay?” asked one of the young guys sitting nearby on the grassy bank.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t get up.”

She remembered she had her phone. She scrabbled for it. Dad back at the cottage was in no shape to help but she could call his friend Jim. “I’ll be there in three minutes,” said Jim.

Above her on the bank, Jim wanted to pull her up. “No,” she said, “that’s not gonna work.” She figured he’d just tumble, himself. He’d fall in her direction.

Then a pair of girls came promenading by. “Can we help you?” they asked.

“Well,” she said, “I hope so.” They grabbed her under the arms and lifted her. They walked her across the grass to the macadam lane. She felt strong enough then to dismiss them and took herself back to the tent.

The third episode, she’d just stepped off the sidewalk in front of the cottage, onto the shrubbed, uneven ground of the flower bed, aiming to pick off a dead bloom. But that same dizziness overtook. She felt like a top spinning around. She tried to reverse herself but fell anyhow, rolled into the street, and lay there like a dead animal. (Her words, not mine.)

It was suppertime. No traffic. She was in the ditch, right where delivery trucks stopped. What if a truck came? Nobody was around. Even if she hollered, Dad wouldn’t hear. She didn’t know what to do besides pray. She prayed that somebody would see her. And they did. The car rounding the bend stopped, the person jumped out, and they led her to a chair on the porch.

Four, she and Phil had gone up to the vast, looming assisted-care building to pick up the fundraiser ham-and-cheese sandwiches she’d ordered. Exiting the building, outside the big sliding doors of the main entrance, Phil right next to her so she could hang onto him, she thought she heard somebody calling to her, and when she turned to see, she must’ve detached from Phil. The quick movement—maybe when she swiveled back toward Phil—her dizziness—caused her to cascade into a bush. Going down, she also bumped her head on the fat white portico pillar.

There she sat, bolt upright, in the middle of the bush.

People kept going past, smiling at her.

“Who’s going to help me get up?” she asked, and somebody told her they’d called an ambulance. You weren’t supposed to touch the person until the ambulance came.

She was perfectly fine, though. Just, her head was dented. You can still see the dent.

The fifth was the worst.

The ladies’ luncheon over, the transport van idling by the curb, ready to deliver her and a few of the other women back to their cottages, Mom got her foot lifted up almost high enough to hoist herself into the back seat. But she started sliding back down. Mary, the driver, didn’t see. Thinking Mom was in her seat, she began pulling away from the curb and Mom got knocked to the ground.

Ladies were screaming, “Stop! Stop!”

She doesn’t remember dragging. She just remembers lying there in the hot overhead sun, and somebody holding an umbrella over her. And Mary standing by with the ladies, wiping her tears with a hanky.

She doesn’t remember the ambulance ride, either, or how long she was in the hospital. They fixed her broken hip, they rehabilitated her. It was Mary who really suffered, emotionally. Mary felt terrible. Dad was still alive and she took care of him and Phil, bringing food and food and food. She took their dirty laundry home with her. She relived and relived her horror.

For Mary it’s a wound that won’t ever heal, not wholly. Mom, though. Aside from Mary’s pain, Mom is good.

“I’m feeling really good these days,” she said a couple of days ago, when I telephoned.

 

P.S. I spotted—at Gift & Thrift that same day—Mary Pipher’s Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders. It’s excellent. I can’t recall when I read it—maybe after my mother hit 80. We’re all of us traveling there, you know. We’re already tipsy, or on the way.