"You can only do what you can do"

Just got home from my volunteer work. Didn’t actually work that hard tonight, not in the normal sense. S--- had started dinner hours before, and set the table, though she let me cook the asparagus. Dished up food for one resident and ate with him, but I don’t think he speaks much English so there wasn’t a lot of conversation.

Then I went back, as usual, to say hi to Sue for a few minutes. She's one of the residents there. She has been incapacitated with a stroke, so she stays in bed all day. But before that (when she was merely sick and presumably dying) she had a wicked sense of humor so I got to be friends with her. Anyway, I usually check in on her whenever I visit.

We talked about the basketball game she had on, and about something else (because of her stroke it is often hard for me to tell what she is saying). And then ... I think she was saying that she will have to move out in a month and a half because she’s been here a year and seems stable. (The policies are that this place is for those who are actively dying.) And she’s not sure where to go or how to pay for it. And she started talking about insurance policies she has and how she wanted those to go to her family after she dies instead of raiding them for her support. And she started crying. “Everyone tells me to be brave and I try so hard, but I can’t be brave all the time.”

Well of course not. You can only do what you can do, and that has to be good enough.

So I kissed her forehead and held her hand and talked with her for a while. And our talk ranged over this and that. At one point she said that her older brother was disappointed in her choice of husband ... I think she said because her husband wasn’t rich or high-earning or something like that. I told her that it was none of her brother’s business, but only hers. (Also this must be ancient history by now, mustn't it?) And then she talked about how somebody’s kids ... I think this was still her older brother ... had made complete messes of their lives. So of course I explained that, in the first place, if your kid wins the Nobel Prize you’re not going to claim it’s all because of you; so likewise if they mess up their lives why is that suddenly your fault? And in the second place, you could write the biography of every single person on earth as a story of repeated failure by cherry picking your data, because every one of us fails more often than we succeed. Failure isn’t the big deal ... the point is to dust yourself off and come back again tomorrow.

I didn’t use these words for any of it, but that was the gist. Or what I remember.

We went on like that for a bit, and she cried a few more times. And then finally she shooed me out to go do dishes while she watched her basketball game. Of course by that time S--- and J--- had done all the dishes. So I dried and put away, and now I’m headed home.

My neighbors are holding a party tonight. I guess I’ll be there for a while ....