Glasses

I gathered up mom’s three pairs of reading glasses yesterday, and washed them this afternoon. She always wore them around her neck while eating meals and had a fairly healthy good dose of humor about how they caught stray food. Each pair needed a good cleaning. My plan is donate them to Lions Club.

I ran my thumb nail around the inside of the upper frame of the second pair and came away with blood. This must have been the pair she was wearing when she fell and hit her head as the stroke occurred. Obviously someone at the community washed the glasses as there were no overt sign of blood on them.

It was a weird, but not uncomfortable, to find myself with my mama’s DNA on my thumbnail, and so close to the anniversary of her death. Aside from her ashes, and a locket of her hair, it’s the last, and unexpected, experience of her I’ve had in almost a year. It filled me with thoughts of what it must have been like for her to experience the stroke, fall, hit her head on the way down, and then lay on the bathroom floor until staff came to pick up her dinner dishes. How long was she there alone? Was she scared? Pissed? Resigned? When they found her she was still able to answer questions, respond to the care staff. But the call I got was different. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you that…” Other calls due to falls, even when EMS was brought in, were far more informational, ‘out of an abundance of caution’ calls. It’s taken a year for me to do this deep-dive… Triggered by a little blood.