My mom often speaks of getting older like it's a cruel joke that God or some other creator plays on the elderly.
She has a point. The last three years have been tumultuous and tragic for her. First, she lost the home she lived in and loved for more than 40 years because she and my dad could no longer care for it. They moved, cramming more than 3,000 square feet of memories and material possessions into a 1,300-square-foot condo that would never feel like home.
Then she lost her husband and the condo that was never a home began to feel like a prison instead. It didn't help that she also lost her driver's licence.
And a year later, when the condo was also too much to manage, she moved again - this time to an independent living facility, that, while starting to feel like home, can never replace what she lost.
Somehow, during all this drastic change, her body changed, too. Her hips, legs, knees and fingers don't work like they used to, and it's a good day if she can walk around her building without needing a bench at the half-way point.
Thirty years ago, it was a different story, of course. Well before they were afflicted with tremors and unable to come together, her fingers deftly wrapped themselves around the stem of an HB pencil and illustrated the gentle words she used to teach me simple addition. I kept forgetting to carry the one, and my Hilroy exercise book was filled with angry red marks from my teacher reinforcing my failures.
She kept our house running all through my childhood and decades into my adulthood. With great endurance, she hoed, planted, weeded and harvested our garden, and stocked the freezer with homemade bread and the pantry with the pickled and preserved results of her garden forays.
While not a bookkeeper by any stretch, she made sure bills were paid and also added to the household bottom line with full-time employment as soon as her youngest - me - entered school. In her retirement, she traveled, she volunteered for the union that
represented her during her working career and she continued to garden, cook and bake until these things became physically, mentally and psychologically impossible.
As with most elderly people, her body has begun to betray her. But where others see lines on her face, I see the roadmap of a million smiles. Where others see hands squeezed by arthritis, I see them shaped to be held, perfectly fit for an embrace.
I hate that others don't see what I see; nor do they see their own future selves in our senior population, or ageism wouldn't be the most tolerated form of social discrimination in Canada, as a 2012 study suggests.
While age has its challenges, we should all be lucky enough to arrive there.
June 1 to 7 is Seniors Week in B.C., and a perfect time to reflect on the wisdom of French writer, philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir, who said: "If we do not know who we are going to be, we cannot know who we are: Let us recognize ourselves in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state."
When we honour our seniors, we honour ourselves.
