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Yesterday and today's project is organizing jewelry that was on the bedroom dresser. My husband put it on my side of the bed (that I am not using since he locked me out) and told me to clean off the bed. I gave away clothes at church last week, which the pastor's wife took most. This week I gave her a jacket that I had spent hours tailoring. She wadded it up.
I'm reminiscing about when I at age 28 took care of my dear mother for 7 months in our home while she (at age 63) was dying of cancer, the inheritance I received, and how much it would be in today's money. My father had died four years earlier at age 65. She didn't want to go into a nursing home because she said they would just drug her out and that would be like already being dead and/or leaving her wet in bed. They do that. She wanted to be awake to pray for healing. The worse part of it was watching the pain she was in. I learned to give her shots of Morphine but most of them either didn't take effect or only lasted 10 to 20 minutes. As the hours rolled by and she was begging for more, I never knew how early I dare give it, to not overdose and accidentally kill her. The doctor said not to worry, and that he would sign the death certificate with no problems. Still, I didn't want to be the one ending her life since she wanted so badly to live. The 2nd worse thing was when two ladies came and told her she wasn't healed because of sin in her life. She racked her brain for weeks, it was horrible. That is such a cruel thing to do to someone dying. That was NOT from my God of love! I do believe in the miracle of supernatural healing but we are mortal beings living in a fallen world of death and destruction, so we all die eventually. She finally asked me to fast for her. I did till I was falling apart so then I felt like a failure. I cooked her 3 hot meals a day of anything she said appealed to her plus the warm coffee cake she liked, but the death certificate said in fancy words that she starved to death. She couldn't keep anything down. I wonder now if she was allergic to Morphine because that is what happened to me in the hospital a couple of years ago. The two things she said were that the survival instinct is stronger than we know or realize, and to always be grateful you can eat. I gained a lot of weight trying to feed her. Being 28 years old with 2 small children it was more than a full-time job. She became like my child, as I sat on the end of her bed hour after hour rubbing her cold feet. I didn't know I could push my body that hard to stay awake and live on so little sleep. The last couple of months I never went to bed, I just fell asleep an hour at a time sitting at the end of her bed with her feet in my lap. She didn't want me to leave her even to mop my kitchen floor. Fortunately, she died peacefully in my arms rather than like the dire warnings of my doctor brother-in-law. I was so physically exhausted by the time she died it took me a year to recover.
She left my sister and me $20,000.00 each when she died in 1970. I was surprised that they had that much under the circumstances, knowing how desperately hard they had worked and sacrificed. My dad had been disabled during what would have been his most productive working years from a stroke and a terrible car accident. Although he had little education he was smart as a whip and put all the cockpit instruments in Eisenhower's Presidential Airplane at Lockheed himself. Living through the depression they were “extremely” frugal. They had “roomers” living upstairs and over the garage and she used to make their beds and tidy their rooms every day and vacuum, dust, and wash their sheets and towels every week in an old washing machine with a wringer. She was always worried that it would eat my arm when I helped her. In her whole life, she never had a better machine and hung all those sheets for us and the borders or roomers outside on our many clotheslines. And she was so diligent to wash them all every week. I have a washer and dryer (used) and I don't always get it done that often. I remember so well her washing her nylon ruffled curtains and putting them on big frames made just the right size, with little nails all the way around to stretch those beautiful sheer curtains. I bet not many of you ever saw those frames. And she beat the rugs outside. Now imagine this, in their first little house in California, the bedrooms were upstairs but they had to rent them all out (plus more over the garage) because my father was off work for a year before I was five, with his bad back (it runs in the family). In alternate years her mother lived with us, so the three adults and we two children lived downstairs with no bedroom. We all slept in the dining room. The bathroom was upstairs so someone built a little lean-to bath downstairs on the back of the house. We moved to a bigger house when I was five but we still had roomers which made a lot of extra work for her since she took care of them like motel's did. They had no kitchen privileges so expectations were different then. She was the president of the women's society at church when I was seven to eleven, and busy with all the members and activities. My dad said the phone must have been growing to her ear. She never drove a car, but started working as a salesgirl at Bullock's (which became Macy's in 1995) when I was eleven, and took the bus five days a week, then six days during Christmas Holiday shopping the whole month of December. One day a week, on her day off she cleaned someone else's house, taking two buses. During the Holidays that meant she worked, standing on her feet, seven days a week. I've only known two other women in my life that worked as hard as she did.
She was “Pennsylvania Dutch” and her mother (the one that lived with us alternate years) came west in a covered wagon at six years of age. My mother made many of my dresses and even my dancing costumes until she started working outside the home. I danced on stage in theaters between shows, from four years old till about seven. Here again, she took us on the bus, plus to all of our doctor and dentist appointments. She was in the “better” jewelry section at Bullock's so had to dress up fancy every day. That is probably partly where I got used to the idea of dressing nicely. That and the actress paper dolls I played with and all their ballgowns (with no other clothes) every day after school because I was all alone. She even kept working at Bullock's after my father died, taking the bus, with her cancer till she couldn't stand anymore. I will finish this in a day or two with “Part 2 ”. That $20,000.00 she left me in 1970 when she died represented my parents working like dogs and skimping and saving for a lifetime. I put it in a joint bank account with my husband but he closed it quite soon, took it all, and put it in an account with only his name on it that did not have my signature so I couldn't touch it, and I never saw it again. He might have it today for all I know, but I don't think so. Just to give you an idea of what that money represented to her and to me 52 years ago, I looked it up on Google which said: “$20,000 in 1970 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $152,719.59 today, an increase of $132,719.59 over 52 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.99% per year between 1970 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 663.60%.”
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56.4 kg
Lost so far: 0 kg.
Still to go: 3.1 kg.
Diet followed: Reasonably Well.
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Losing 2.5 kg a Week
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