Mothers, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be T.V. Watchers

Towards the sunset of your life, you or someone you love will be in the hospital.  All over the ward, bored people will be watching television.

Raise your children and yourself in such a way that instead you ring a little bell by the bedside table, and someone wakes up, wraps himself in a blanket, and reads you Mansfield Park.

Mom's mind is sharp and clear.   She's always worried that she hasn't done enough with her intelligence.  And it's quite true that she could easily have been a lawyer or a professor or something if she hadn't had children and raised them. 

But as far as a wasted mind... 

No, I don't think so.

My brother-in-law and I were walking with her around the ward for exercise on Saturday morning.  She was in too much pain to go far.  But we were joking about this, how young the doctors were, how old and useless we all feel.  I told mom, "It would have been a waste if we hadn't had so much fun."

She nodded, and I think as we look back on how the family has felt, the weird grace that descended on us when the worst news came, that we've chosen a pretty good road.

Tonight her dextrose-and-protein-and-lipid drip has given her the shakes.  Her blood sugar is a little high, but not abnormal.  She was wakeful for a while, and bored.  She never thinks of watching the television.  But we read a little Jane Austen.  She pushed her pain button, and as I read about the Misses Bertram (whose vanity was so perfect as to be undetectable) I could see from the corner of my eye the clear morphine drip into my mother, clouding her mind a little, dulling her sense, but beneath it a mind clear as day, as interesting as any lesson in nature or art.

I read awhile, while her eyes glazed over and then closed behind her glasses.  In the next room I hear the hum of machines that manage pain, keep her alive a little longer.