Of Aging Mothers, Health Care, and the Making of Soup

About two weeks ago my brother called to tell me that my mother was in the Emergency room and he was on his way there. I am the sibling that lives hundreds of miles away from home and he is the one who lives just on the other side of the city from Mom.  My mother had called for an ambulance because she was in great pain. She was sent home with some painkillers but no diagnosis. Five days later, I flew up to spend the weekend with her in her apartment at the assisted living facility she moved herself into several years ago.

Mom was spending most of her time asleep except for the brief hour or so every six hours when the pain meds kicked in. I arrived on the same day as her diagnosis - a collapsed vertebrae that screamed bloody murder every time she needed to turn her body.  We had a diagnosis but not a treatment plan. The MRI doctor didn’t call until after 5 on a Friday evening. We’d have to wait until Monday morning when mom’s internist opened up his office again. 

On her own, Mom was okay in her apartment. The upside of the high rent she had been paying meant she had a call button necklace she could press whenever she needed assistance to get out of bed and visit the bathroom. She could order food in from the dining hall downstairs. I was there because I could be. I was there because I wanted to give my brother, who had been very intensely involved, a break. I was there because I wanted to be there, watching over her. One of the qualities in her I observed that weekend was her ability to persevere, to just put her head down and get through the situation. My mother was born in 1933, when the Great Depression and clearly taken hold but before the basic safety nets had been put into place. Her father was killed by a drunk driver when my mother was six months old. For the first three years of her life, my mother was moved from family member to family member until she was adopted by friends of friends at the age of three years. There wasn’t a lot of milk in her diet. Her bones are now crumbling into bits and pieces within her. 

Of course I wanted to cook for her and went to the local grocery store to gather the ingredients for a nutrient rich luncheon soup. I bought a box of chicken stock, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, sausage, and bread. Like many her age, my mother gave up cooking for herself years ago. It is hard to cook and eat at a table set for one. It is better to go downstairs for lunch and dinner and dining companions. 

My mother was in bed when I returned. I cut up the onion and a few cloves of garlic and started to saute them in butter. Normally I’d use olive oil but Mom didn’t have any oil in the cupboard. I cut the sausage into bite size disks and browned them. I cut the carrots and celery into mouth sized pieces and added them to the onions and garlic and sausage and pushed the lot around the pan for a few moments. Some salt and pepper and the box of stock followed. I let it sit on the heat, occasionally stirring, till it came to a boil. In the meantime I made toast. Warm, crunchy, buttery toast. Then I went to help my mother out of bed and to come sit at the counter and be fed. 

For some reason, the story of Jesus healing Simon-Peter’s mother-in-law popped into my head at that moment. Its a very short story but is in the three synoptic Gospels:  Matthew 8:14-15, Mark 1:29-31, Luke 4:38-39. Essentially, after a long day, Jesus shows up at Simon-Peter’s house. Simon-Peter’s mother-in-law (another woman in our Gospels without a name) is sick in bed with a fever. Jesus heals the fever and the once ill-woman jumps up out of bed and fixes up dinner for everyone. 

As I got Mom settled in a chair, I realized that I hadn’t really thought much about that passage. While it’s in all three synoptic Gospels, it’s only in one of the Lectionary Cycle readings (Epiphany 5B in case you were wondering) and even there it is part of a larger passage focusing on miracles in general. It’s very easy to run past the specific, nameless, mother-in-law in light of the crowd that shows up at the door later that evening. This morning, Tuesday, a week-plus later, I pulled up the sermon preparation website, The Text This Week, and poked around at the commentaries and sermons linked to Mark 1:29-39. 

Simon-Peter’s mother-in-law doesn’t get a lot of attention here either. I guess that is understandable in light of the miracles still to come. Getting someone over their fever looks like small stuff in light of the future acts of reviving children from their death beds and later pulling Lazarus from his tomb. Besides, we all have that ability to perform the miracle of removing fever sitting around in our bottles of aspirin and antibiotics. 

But I have sat up late into the night with my babies locked up in fever and I do not take the breaking of fever, the sign that healing has won and recovery will begin, lightly. 

I go to get my mother out of her bed. This is how it goes that Saturday afternoon. I brace myself and hold out my hands. She pulls against my bracing till she is in a sitting position. Now the worst part starts. She has to turn her hips so that her feet are on the floor. The pain that washes across her face is difficult to witness. Then, again, her cane in one hand and my bracing hand in the other, she pulls herself to a stand. I start to walk backward and she follows, still using me as a balancer. We walk out of her bedroom, across the tiny living room and to the office chair waiting by the counter that marks the beginning of the kitchen area. She eases down into the chair which is then turned toward the counter and the waiting bowl of soup and still warm toast. She eats the first bowl, the second and makes it into the third.

“I smelled the food in the bedroom,” she told me. “It was heavenly.” I can see the color return to her face and the energy to her eyes. 

I think the reason the story of Simon-Peter’s Mother-in-law popped into my head is because I want my mother to be fully restored to health and an active life. Today, Tuesday,  she will go in for a procedure that will hopefully do exactly that. In the meantime, she endured another trip to the emergency room in search of better pain management, a two night stay in the hospital where she at least learned how to move herself with less pain, and the last several days with day-time in-home care.  I have talked to her by phone almost daily since returning to my home. My brother has given away hours and days of his life as he challenged the corporate health care system on her behalf. But the pain relief has been spotty and we are both concerned for her future. Two-and-a-half weeks spent mostly in bed is not great for a woman of her age. 

The commentators don’t know what to do with this story of a Woman-with-a-Fever. Some of the few that take it on talk about how Jesus healing on a Sabbath is another  challenge to the religious cultural prioritization of piety (no work on the Sabbath) over ministry (take care of each other every day). Quite frankly, this pulls all humanness out of the story and makes the Woman-with-a-Fever a political action, not an act of specific care for a specific person and her family.  Another commentator lifts up her springing out of her sickbed and into immediate service as a model for us all - we should all be selfless and eager to serve Jesus at all times which is fine, but again strips whatever specific person there is from this woman to make her a moral example for us all. 

As a woman, as a mother, as a wife and a daughter and as a European-American member of the middle-class with pizza delivery at my door and take-outs just down the road, I tend to read the story of Simon-Peter’s Mother-in-law with a roll of my eyeballs. “What is up with this,” I think to myself. “Can’t Jesus and the boys get their own dinner and leave the poor woman alone?  Are these guys so helpless that they have to get a sick woman out of her bed just so they can eat?” 

But today I’m reading the story from the point of view of the one so silent, she’s not even in the story, Simon-Peter’s wife, the daughter of the Mother-with-a-fever. I imagine she is standing there, holding an onion in one hand and a knife in the other. I imagine she’s already been cooking up a storm - and cooking was hard, hard work. I imagine her back is aching from bending over the fires, her mother’s bed, and her neck muscles are tense and screaming with worry and fear. 

I imagine the look on her face as her mother gets up and walks over to her. I imagine her mother frowns at the mess that her daughter hasn’t had the time to clean up and how the mother takes the onion and the knife into her own hands with that irritating little tsk noise she makes when things aren’t done properly. I imagine the daughter’s gasp of joy and relief knowing that the work of food and family will still be shared between them.  I imagine the daughter turning toward the carrots and the barly grains destined for that evening’s meal of chicken stew in silent gratitude knowing that while her mother will eventually fall sick and die, that time wasn’t today and today she was going to take. 

This is such a small story but it was important enough to survive the editing process of  all three synoptic Gospels. I’m not sure it’s a moral example, but it can be if you want it to be. I’m not sure it’s a political act, but it can be if you want it to be. For me, today, it is a story that God/Jesus/Holy Spirit sees all of us who are sons and daughters now becoming parents to our mothers and fathers. It is a story that reminds us that our heartfelt desire for these flawed, imperfect, aging parents to be restored to full, independent health is not beneath God’s noticing and even God’s direct intervention - at least in the case of one mother-with-a-fever. 

In the meantime, after my mother enjoyed her lunch, I helped her stand and together we walked back to her bed and blessed sleep. In the kitchen remain the pots and plates that I would wash and put back away in her cupboards. In twenty-eight hours my mother will be checked into a hospital in search of pain relief and I will be in an airport hotel, finishing up the left-over soup which nourishes me as much as it did my mother. 

------------------------------------------------------ 

Anitra Kitts is a writer and a daughter living in Northern California. Anitra joins her brother and the doctor who has brought relief to Mom in wondering why the fracture wasn't picked up on in the x-ray from her first visit to the E-room. 

Comments

[Peggy OKelly]

I'm glad I stumbled upon your site..that is a beautiful writing.

[Anitra Kitts]

thank you. please consider coming back again. we write about lots of things here...

[Byron Wade]

Thanks, Anitra for the great post. Makes one wonder and reflect on the theological significance of growing old.

[Anitra Kitts]

Thank you Byron. I'm not sure I have any particularly new insights on aging or accompanying aging - theological or otherwise. But I'm always grateful to have a chance to share my stories with others, and to hear back when we find a common space.

[Shelley Weiss]

As I sit here in the living room of my mothers house, I type in, aging mothers, and your kind and beautiful writing brought tears to my eyes. My mom has gone back to bed, she is up at 4am and down at 9am, up at 11 and down at three. Last night at three she threw up from the celebrex, we gave here gatoraid, ice and a bendy straw...I watch the sun come up in the soon to be fierce Arizona sky, long for Utah and snow, long for a time when I was ten. Thank you, Shelley

[Anitra Kitts]

Shelly - thank you so much for commenting. I read this a week ago and set the computer down in awe of how you grab with just a few words what it is we long for as we tend our loved ones. tears also come to me as I read your words.

[buy cialis]

an excellent life experience I congratulate you're a brave man to confront the problem and even COMMET for us no matter what I felt at that moment