"Ghost"

Time pauses   

            when I dream of you   

                        Reversing—   

                                    pulling me back through years   

            until I hear   

                        your booming laughter ricochet     

            You appear before me   

            I embrace your solidity   

                        catch a whiff of Old Spice,   

                                    pipe tobacco   

            My tiny hand clutches yours   

            I am your child   

                       again   

                                    looking up into your deep brown eyes   

            You swing me up   

                        high onto your shoulders   

            I pat your chin—rough, unshaven   

                        Suddenly   

                                    We stand in my front yard   

                                                hugging goodbyes   

                                                promising another visit   

            Plans cancelled by death   

Time pauses   

            when I dream of you   

                        Reversing—   

                                    pulling me back through years   

            until I stand   

                        alone in the night   

            Suffering under the weight of grief   

            Conjuring you with my heartbreak   

                        your voice rises with enthusiasm   

                                    strengthens with determination     

            We argue politics   

            We agree to disagree   

                        again  

                                    looking into your deep brown eyes    

            You vanish   

                        leaving me sorrowful   

            Regretting silly squabbles   

                        Suddenly   

                                    I stand alone   

                                                searching for you     

                                                listening for your essence   

            Knowing you are gone forever  

IOUNIO's "Time Travler" for today's post!

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"Working Weekend"

 

            Life hands many of us solvable problems that eventually settle down. A sore throat that eases after sipping hot tea laced with lemon and honey.  A car repair setting back the budget for several months. A job loss batters you down for years. If you have family and close friends, you rely upon their experiences, emotional support, and sometimes financial help to recover and move forward.

            Over the years, I cannot remember a time when life handed us an obstacle that we had to handle all alone. As isolating as the caregiver years felt, we still had each other to turn to at the end of each day. In recent months, life has plowed into some of my single friends and family members. An unexpected illness, a slow recovery from surgery, or an overwhelmed and overworked emotional pounding pummeled people I love into a pulp. Always reluctant to ask for help, they put out tentative, subtle signs that events have pulled them underwater. Caught up in my own ups and downs, I missed my own brother’s growing need for relief.

            My brother, challenged by both physical and learning differences, structures his day with routines. He spends his life in a “rinse and repeat” cycle. His work requires the same things daily. He buys the same groceries every week. He pays his bills in person and often in cash when he can. He relies on television for entertainment and news. Last winter, he convinced me to skip our usual trips to his house—he was sick with a stomach bug and wanted rest, and then his job, for several months, required overtime that meant working either extra hours or even extra days. He insisted that he was fine, just tired and not up to visitors.

            Eventually, he ran out of excuses to delay our visit, and February found us descending into his darkened home. He hadn’t replaced light bulbs in each room. His clean laundry piled high in his bedroom while dirty laundry took over part of his garage. He had handled getting a new thermostat for his air conditioner, but his car’s ENGINE light warned of trouble. When we tried to shower that night, only ice cold water came out. He’d lived without hot water for many months.

            We sat down and made a list and plowed through most of it together. That’s when his “aloneness” hit home. All of the chores, big or small, fall onto him. With his extended working hours over several months, he simply gave up on tackling anything but keeping his clothes clean. Together, we hung and folded, sorted and tossed. Together, we took his car in for its repairs. Usually, he walks home from the repair shop. What a luxury to have someone there to drive him home! As a family, we swept and mopped his floors, took out an oversized bush near his front door, and stripped and remade all of his beds. One working weekend with three people reset his household chores.

            His bathroom, though, required more work. The bolt holding the toilet in place had stripped. My scrub brush with Barkeeper’s Friend erased the mildew, but all of the caulk needed to be removed and replaced. The popcorn ceiling over his tub flaked, and every fixture showed its age. We broke down this room’s work into three parts: plumber repairing the toilet first for sanitary reasons; new caulk and paint that we can do; replacing all of the fixtures and the hot water heater (plumber again).

            Arriving at the house this last weekend, we found the toilet repaired and the mildew completely gone. I “watered” the ceiling to make the popcorn easier to remove. While my husband sliced through the old stuff, caulked the tub, and repainted the room including a touchup of the tub’s exterior, I partnered with my brother to streamline his linen closet to only the sheets and towels he uses, bagging away old sets of sheets for donations.

            This next week, he will call his plumber to get prices for his hot water heater and possibly updating all of the twenty-year-old fixtures, including the light. If all of this is within the budget, he’ll get things fixed. We discussed the importance of having hot water again being more important than updating the shower head, faucets and lights. We made pledges to one another that he will let us know when things go wrong, but I know there are many things around him that he simply doesn’t notice as needing attention. I left with a new list of “Must Do” already started. However, he had maintained all of the housework we’d helped him with from the previous visit—no clean laundry piled high or dirty laundry stacked in the garage, no un-swept or un-mopped floors. If we keep on a regular schedule to provide extra hands on working weekends, all should be well.   

Copyright 2025 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

"The Weight of Her Sorrows"

 

her beloved child
unique
irreplaceable
each day a miracle
she shelters
advocates
her joy wrapped in loss
 
her life partner
unchanging
dedicated
each day a miracle
she lingers
vigilant
her love imprisoned by illness
 
her treasured sister
precious
prized
each day a miracle
she weeps
alone
her life changed by chance
 
her independent life
unconventional
melodic
each day a miracle
she fades
diminished
her essence cut by dementia
 

   

Copyright 2023 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

"Deer in the Headlight"

            Defiantly, her eyes locked with mine. Not a ripple of concern in her stance or glance as she faced me while my heart shifted to a faster syncopation. My headlights mirrored from her pupils for a second before she dismissed me. Casually, she crossed the road with the confidence that no harm would befall her.

            My foot, stamped to the brake, eased off to crawl my car forward. The predawn shadows complicated my search of the path from which the doe had unexpectedly emerged. No fawns follower her, and I cruised up to 20 MPH.

            As I rounded the corner, our small neighborhood herd waited in edgy anticipation by its morning feeding spot. Daily, an elderly retired man dumped buckets of dried corn from the back of his pickup truck. In long ago conversation, he’d told me that he needed to know someone counted on him being somewhere each day. With his wife’s death, his retirement had turned to unexpected loneliness that he filled by caring for these deer. This morning five deer awaited his arrival.

            My thoughts drifted from the doe to an old man’s loneliness as I edged onward into my day.

Copyright 2019 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

"A Beautiful Day"

          The most difficult part of caring for my mother comes on beautiful days like today. We woke up this morning with crispness. The air carried a snap to it that caused me to pull the covers up a little higher and bury myself a little deeper into bed. When I let the dogs outside, I lingered in the doorway, sniffing autumn. Sunrise takes on a clear golden glow this time of the year, and I long to grab my journal or a novel and swing under the live oak for hours on end.

Edna Abrams and Koi
September 29, 2011

         Because my mother can no longer get into and out of her wheelchair without aid, she needs someone close by throughout the day. I never dreamed that her condition would mean sacrificing morning walks to the park or afternoons spent in the gardens. Her limitations restrict my movements as well. During most of the day, we stay in the same room together unless I’m doing housework. Even when I do chores, I swing into whatever room Mom occupies to see if she needs anything—and just to let her know I’m near even if she can’t see me.

         My days become a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, it’s similar to having a very young child around—one that needs food to be the right temperature and cut into very small pieces; and one that requires help in bathing, dressing, and toiletry needs. On the other hand, I give care to an adult—and my own parent. I still try to defer to Mom’s desires and requests with respect. As speech becomes more and more difficult for her, expressing her wishes isn’t always easy. If she starts to laugh or cry, I’m at a loss to unravel what she’s asking for or from me.

         Each day, Mom begins her bed routine around three in the afternoon. One symptom of her disease is an urgency to eat. She’ll demand meals or snacks in two or three hour intervals and waiting for something to eat proves almost impossible for her. Because Huntington’s Disease affects her ability to swallow, she’s limited in her food choices. I tried a few months ago to rely on frozen meals as a solution to getting her something to eat as quickly as possible. After a week or so, Mom commented that the food tasted horrible and started refusing to eat them. I now prepare huge meals that I know she likes and freeze them in smaller portions.

         Once Mom eats her dinner, she insists on brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. That means we’re pulling on her nightgown by four every afternoon. Since Mom gets up by 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock each morning, she feels exhausted pretty early in the evening because she doesn’t take any naps during the day. Mom will ask for help in getting into bed, get up ten minutes later with a request to go watch television, and repeat the bed-television-bed-bathroom-television-bed cycle until six o’clock. One day, she did this obsessive rotation more than twenty times!

         Recently, she’s taken to ringing her service bell just to make certain that she hasn’t been left alone. Today, because she watched Children of the Corn earlier, she rang the bell several more times than usual, finally asking with a devilish grin if we had an ax in the house “just in case.”

         Intellectually, I understand Mom’s need to have someone close at hand. My mother’s body traps her in space. Emotionally, it sometimes proves impossible for me to stay within the confines of her disease. Today, I escaped on a quick drive to Sonic once David returned home from running errands we used to do as a family. I keep reminding myself, though, that every day holds beauty. I simply need to look for it.        

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman 

"His Easy Smile"

They believed his easy smile   
the laughter at all the right places   
while he cloaked his deception through necessity     
as the world within him clung to distortions   
Illness subtly ate at his reason   
making it impossible to disguise the turmoil within   
unless he buried it under the things he loved:   
games, computers, politics, religion   
Intellect guided him to delude   
to use his words to hide his thoughts   
Need shepherded him to security   
safety with the familiar:   
church and keyboard, childhood ritual and digital certainty   
where he shared with his surrogates     
the Truths he let them see   
Security in his world narrowed down   
into a box of silent despair   
broken only by the words, “I love you”   

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman