The Care-Giver
THE SICKNESS arrived in the spring. A rash and a sense of imbalance: her feet, she complained, felt heavy, as though she could not lift them from the ground. The falls began later that summer: minor trips around the house, then a big one while walking the dog. They blamed it on a tree root that had upended the concrete sidewalk, it was something anyone could have done. But when she went to Urgent Care, the doctor examined her hurt shoulder and then asked her to walk around the room, studying her gait.
I think you need to see someone, the doctor said.
She didn’t right away. Later, she would second-guess herself, wonder if she had caught it earlier, they might have done something. But of course, there was nothing to be done. It was one of those progressive diseases that had no cure and though they were not sure—the doctors at Penn consulting, consulting, and sending her from one test to another—she knew. Not that she talked about it and not that she gave in. She did not give up her dog walks, she simply limited them to around her garden, so in case she fell she did so on soft, warm grass. She kept up her garden, holding onto a long shovel, hobbling around from tulips to rhodies, getting her husband to do the plantings, to move one juniper bush to another spot where it would get more sun.
Earlier in her life, she had played tennis three times a week, sometimes four. She was not a great tennis player, but she enjoyed it. She played in her mother’s old tennis clothes which drooped on her, but she had inherited her mother’s wardrobe after her death, and either in her honor or because she believed in pinching pennies, that was all she wore. Truth be told, for years she made a strange figure, marching around the neighborhood with her dog wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat that her mother had used on the beach and her mother’s expensive but seriously out-of-date outfits. Before the sickness had descended, some of the tennis girls got together and out of kindness or cattiness (who could be sure?) urged her
