Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles by Rivvy Neshama (top rated books of all time .TXT) 📗

Whenever I’d visit, Katherine would give a surprised “Oh, hi” and a smile. Then she’d sit back down in a gray reclining chair, and I’d sit in a brown leather chair facing her. Slowly, our relationship evolved. We even found things to talk about—things we liked doing as kids, politics, and Oprah.

One day Katherine told me how she was raised: by elderly adoptive parents in the Midwest who believed that children were meant to be silent and just listen. Well, no wonder she wasn’t much of a talker! Shortly after that, I stopped worrying about keeping the conversation going. In fact, one day, when I was tired and her house was even warmer than usual, I sat in that brown leather chair, closed my eyes, and fell asleep. I must have slept for ten minutes, and when I woke up, Katherine was still sitting facing me, and it was all okay. How nice it felt to be with someone and it was fine to just be there, to even fall asleep. When I left, she said, as always, “Thanks for coming. It means a lot to me.” Joy.

AND THEN THERE WAS RITA

And then there was Rita. Irish Rita from the Bronx. White hair in a bob, impish green eyes, a tough little woman with a big spirit. She was my friend Paul V.’s mother and the most fun elder I ever met, bar none.

Rita was earthy. She told bawdy jokes and was a great storyteller, imitating the voices of everyone she described. And whenever John was coming back from a business trip, she’d urge me to “make whoopee! Make lots of whoopee! Do it for me!”

A devout if irreverent Catholic, Rita sprinkled our conversations with casual references to the Blessed Mother, the Mother of the Whole World, whom I came to envision as a female version of the Great Spirit. “Rivvy,” Rita kindly assured me, “she’s the Mother of All. That means Catholics and Jews and everyone.”

Rita prayed a lot, for anyone in need, and she strongly believed that her prayers would be heard. “She’s got a direct line to heaven,” our friend Helen confirmed. So whenever I was sick or scared or someone in my family had a problem, I asked Rita to pray for us. Later, she’d tell me how she wrote out the names I gave her and put them by the small statue of the Blessed Mother she kept on her bedroom bureau. Once I knew that, I felt better.

When Rita reached her nineties, her health faded. Small strokes and a few falls left her needing a walker and mostly stuck in her apartment. So John and I would visit her there and take Chinese food, her favorite. “Chicken with nuts,” she’d order, “and brown rice, not white.”

She would always have lots of cake, chocolates, and tea waiting for us, and while we ate, she’d tell her stories and we’d all laugh. She especially loved telling us that she was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, home of the infamous accused murderer Lizzie Borden. Rita would get this devilish look on her face as she recited with glee, “Lizzie Borden had an ax, and gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one!”

One day, Jeanne V. called to say Rita’s health had worsened. They were moving her to assisted living. “She can’t live alone anymore,” Jeanne explained. “Yesterday, she lost the feeling in her legs and couldn’t get up from the bathtub. So she lay there for hours before using her beeper to call anyone. I think she’s lost her judgment. She’s better off where she’s going.”

John and I made plans to go see her, but we were a little scared—afraid she’d be depressed about leaving her home and not sure how she’d seem without her “judgment.”

“It’s a big change,” Rita told me on the phone, “a big change.”

When we arrived at her new place, she looked smaller than before, even though she was now in a much smaller space: one room, in which Paul and Jeanne had neatly placed her bed and bureau, one chair, the statue of the Blessed Mother, and pictures on the wall.

“Sit in the chair,” Rita insisted, as she sat down next to John on the bed. Then she asked him to open the bottom drawer of her bureau—and damn if she didn’t have a cache of chocolates there too, which the three of us began to munch. Soon, Rita was chatting it up like old times, imitating the physical therapist who would bark at her “Knees! Toes! Knees!” and telling us about the nurse she liked best, Rosie Vasquez, who had a bad neck, so Rita gave her a massage.

We asked how her legs were doing, and she told us the story of being stuck in the tub. “But why did you wait so long to use your beeper?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t want some firemen breaking in and seeing me naked,” Rita explained.

“Stupid me,” she said, laughing. “Being modest! Wouldn’t you know, the day I got here they had this big, burly man give me a shower. He was really big (Rita put her hands out to show just how big he was), and he washed me all over. Then he dried me down with a towel and puffs of air. Poof, poof.”

Rita laughed and laughed. “Oh God! Let me tell you! Poof here. Poof there. Well, I figured, I’m this bag of bones and he’s probably seen everything, so why not? And there I was worried about some firemen seeing me naked!”

Right before we left, I noticed something pinned to her wall—a simple white cloth with red embroidered words: “Sparkle with the Spirit.”

“The nuns gave it to me,” Rita said.

They gave it to the right person.

JUST LIKE ME

It was one week after Annie’s birthday, and we had invited her and Ellie to dinner. Just as we sat down to eat, the doorbell rang. Since it was a