She was beyond old, and a little deaf. She had grown tired of the cold in Illinois and come to Arizona to warm up. She was a night owl, I could hear her TV when I walked past her apartment on the way to the laundry room.
One day, hearing the radio alarm on when I passed her apartment, I wondered why the alarm was ringing in the middle of the afternoon. I picked up my mail at the communal boxes, and heard the alarm on my way back. I knocked on her door. Nothing. I knocked harder. She came to the door, and looked at me smiling.
“It’s good to have youngsters in this place,” she said. I smiled back, it’s been many years since I could have been a youngster, but to her, I was.
“Your radio alarm is ringing,” I said, “so I came to check on you.”
“It is?” she said, “Well, I wonder what it wants.”
I turned it off for her, and chatted for a few minutes.
She asked about the canning jar that sits by the bougainvillea shrubs during the daytime. I explained that it contained a solar battery that charged in the sun, then the jar glowed at night, and I used it to cheer me up in the dark.
“We all need one of those,” she said, “Something that soaks up sun in the day.”
In March, she began to make plans to return to the East.
“I can’t manage by myself anymore,” she said, “so I’m going back to the cold.”
She gave me her ironing board and iron, and I planned on giving her the canning jar, so she could take some Arizona sunshine back with her.
Yesterday, she sat down in her apartment and died of an aneurism. She won’t have to go back to the cold. She won’t have to endure the broiler-heat of July here. I hope that wherever she goes, her generous and cheerful spirit will be happy, and that she will have a bit of Light to enjoy.
–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She lives in Mesa, AZ. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) Quinn McDonald, 2008 All rights reserved.
My best friends have always been the invisible elderly ladies who have marvelous stories to tell: the neighbor who made me promise never to tell her daughter that she once wore a bra made of only two tiny silk hankies stitched together at the corners and held on with bits of ribbon; the lady who took quite a shine to my husband and told him she liked to smoke cigars at night when she was alone; my current German-born friend who grew up in Nazi Germany and worked her way out of the country and into this one by being a maid for Canadian soldiers and then American soldiers and has promised me that if I die before she does, she will come clean my house!
The old are not just our history, they are deep wells of some marvelous stories.
====> These are the very real sharing of stories based on trust and spontaneous friendship, the stories that are so precious to us! I’m sure you draw people with your cheeriness and open attitude.
-Q
health wise, i ve had a ‘rough’ life. oddly, some of the things i ve been able to do in life, some of the dearest people i ve met in life, have been made possible by the ‘rough’ part of my life. i fortunately realize the ‘rough’ part of my life is a very small part of it, and try not to live there too often. i embrace my oldness, and pray to experience as much oldness as possible. life is too short to complain about… and oddly once again, it s the ‘rough’ part of my life that taught me that.
miss you
Thank you Quinn for sharing this story. When I read something like this, it’s like getting a gift I didn’t know I wanted but am very glad to have.
===> Martha’s death is a clear reminder that we have a limited time on earth, and that the effort of kindness is worth the time it takes. There are a lot of older people in Phoenix, and I’m sometimes surprised to see how invisible they are. No one is comfortable looking at old age, because it is unambiguous. “If you are lucky, you will get older.” There aren’t a lot of choices. –Q