June 27, 2012--Ladies of Forest Trace: Frieda

“You’re here two minutes and already I’m giving you bad news.”

We were in Florida, at Forest Trace, in anticipation of celebrating my mother’s 104^th birthday on Thursday.

We braced ourselves because, considering the ages and conditions of her friends and nearby relatives, bad news could be about anyone. Or anyones.

“What happened, mom?” Rona asked. She is much better at bad news than I.

“Frieda, poor thing.”

“Frieda . . . ?”

Frieda is one of the three remaining ladies my mother has dinner with every night. “She’s not here any more.”

“She moved? To be close to her daughter in, is it, Pennsylvania?” A lot of older folks are moving back north so their children and grandchildren can take better care of them.

“Further than that.”

“Where else does she have children?” I asked, “Pennsylvania is far enough.”

“All the way,” my mother said.

Rona understood what “all the way” suggested. “No, Ma, not Frieda. When we were here only two months ago, I know she had been in the hospital, but there didn’t appear to be anything seriously wrong with her.”

“Serious I wouldn’t know about, but I do know there was nothing right with her. She was wonderful, poor thing, but she had so many conditions that I already forgot half of them.”

“So she passed?” I said.

“She died,” my mother said, not one for euphemisms, “Two days ago. Today was her funeral.”

Rona reached across the couch to put her arms around her. “But you didn’t come all the way from Maine or New York or wherever you were to talk about funerals. You’re here for a good time.”

“We’re actually here to be with you,” Rona said, stroking her. “That’s a good enough time for us. And we don’t want you ever to hold anything back from us. We want all the news—the good as well as the bad.”

“But I don’t want to bother you with my troubles. You have your own lives to live. Which I want you to do. And not to worry about me. Poor thing.”

“You mean Frieda?” I asked, sounding stupid to myself.

“She’s the bad news.”

“Anyone else? Anything else?” I asked. “You’re not holding anything back about yourself?”

“Just the usual thises and thats. But my doctor says I should make it to my birthday. Which is tomorrow.” For the first time she smiled.

“We know that.” I was glad to see that she still had her sense of humor. “That’s why we’re here. To celebrate.”

My mother shrugged that off. “You know what I say—‘Every day that I wake up is my birthday.’”

“And we look forward to many, many more,” Rona said, still cradling her.

“Many,” I added, looking for something appropriate to say.

“But no more for Frieda. Birthdays. I mean.” My mother added in case we didn’t understand. “She had her faults, which I will restrain myself from enumerating, but she was a remarkable person. She was a nurse, which in her day was unusual. We didn’t have so many hospitals and people died much younger than they do today—take me as an example—so why did we need so many nurses? But Frieda wanted a career and she wanted to care for people and so she became a nurse. This was even more unusual for a woman with a husband and three children. She had twins and a daughter. In Pennsylvania. Most of the nurses in her day were not married with a family. But she did.”

“I hadn’t thought about what you said,” I said.

“About what are you referring to?”

“How there was so much less need then for nurses. For all medical people. There was less at that time that medicine could do to help people.”

“And help she did. Even here when she herself was not well. Which was always. I can’t begin to tell you all the things she did to take care of people here who came back from rehab but weren’t ready to. Because their benefits had run out.’

“I didn’t know that,” Rona said. “I did know about her knitting.”

“She was knitting all the time even with her diabetes. Poor thing had so much pain from poor circulation. Especially in her feet and hands. But she never stopped crocheting. She sold the little booties she made to the ladies here, for their great-grandchildren. And gave all the money to her causes. Especially to help children with serious conditions. I think she herself wasn’t well when she was a child. She never forgot that.”

“She was remarkable,” I said, finally finding something not awkward to say.

“She also had her political causes. With me she was the first here to support Obama for president. Like me Hillary was her second choice. All the other girls were for her. And as some here became disenchanted with Obama she stuck with him. She was that loyal. And she would have applauded him the other day, if she had not been in hospice and great pain, when he spoke out about the immigrants. The young ones who were brought here by their parents when they were too young to have done so themselves.”

“When he issued an executive order to give them legal status if they had gone to college or served in the military.”

“Yes, that. In fact, the last time she was here, Frieda—before the hospice—she was talking about her own family. About when they came to America from Poland. Where I came from with my mother and sisters and brother. My father was already here. He came to make money to send back to us so we could join him.”

“So many families did the same thing,” Rona said, “I can’t imagine what that was like. By comparison we’re so spoiled.”

“Frieda spoke with so much passion about how America was the refuge for the world. An exaggeration, I know—there were those quotas, and still are--but she was making a good point. Especially when she said that not everyone coming to America in those days were so legal. People may have come through Ellis Island, that’s true, but how many, she reminded us, didn’t tell the truth about who was in their party. She confessed that among the children in her family who left Poland were some who were not really her parents’ children. They were children of relatives and friends who didn’t themselves have the money to buy a boat ticket. So, Frieda reminded us when some at dinner were complaining about immigrants that these children were not strictly speaking legal.”

“But most . . .” I tried to say.

“I know what you’re going to say—that that was small by comparison to what we have now with people sneaking across the border or escaping from Cuba and Haiti by boat.”

She was right. Even as someone who believes it important and just to come up with some national policy to enable people here illegally to have the chance to become citizens, I felt it important to take note of the complexity and size of the problem and to acknowledge that many here feel angry and taken advantage of. That we have to try to find ways to help people become more understanding and compassionate.

“We can talk more about that later because I agree that this is a very complicated issue. But not for Frieda. She saw things like this very simply—when there is an injustice something must be done to correct it. Just as when she saw someone sick or suffering how she never held herself back from trying to do all she could manage to make things even just a little bit better.”

We sat silently for a moment to contemplate some of the meaning of Frieda’s life.

“That was Frieda.”

“I’m glad to have had the chance to get to know her,” Rona said. I nodded in agreement.

“So now there are just three ladies left. Fay and Esther and me. How much time is left for any of us? It’s not realistic to . . .”

I didn’t let her finish her thought, “One never knows about any of us. How much time remains.”

“And remember what you said,” Rona jumped in, “about how every day is your birthday. You’re been saying that for many years and I too have tried to live that way. You set the example for all of us.”

“But it is every day getting harder to do.”

“And . . .”

“And, so, as you said, we’re here to celebrate. I must admit, 104 is a big number.”