Break my heart wide open

“Where am I?” My mother turns her head towards me, eyes glazed over.
“You’re in the University Hospital in Saskatoon.”
“Why am I here?”
“You fell and broke your hip.”
“Why can’t I get up and go home?”
“Well, Mom. You can’t actually walk.”
“Why not?”
“Because they operated on you. You have a new hip. It would hurt too much to walk on it.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s home in the condo with Wendell.”
She stares at the ceiling, trying to mke sense of what I just said.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” She squeezes my hand and my heart breaks wide open.
“Me too, Mom.  I’m glad I can be here with you.”
She sleeps then. And when she wakes, she squeezes my hand again. “I’m so glad you’re here. Where am I?”
I leave a note with the nurses before I leave for the night. “When she wakes up in the night, confused, tell her that Wendell is with Dad and Becky is staying with Greg and Al. She’ll be back in the morning.”

I walk beneath the canopy of old elms that line Temperance Street, so grateful to have good friends whom I can call on at the last minute. I am not crying yet. I am still a little numb; still processing the events of the last few days, unable to peer more than a day or two ahead. It is later, as I try to sleep, that the emotions flow over me and I sob for the mother that raised me. My strong, capable, intelligent, loving mother. She was slipping away before her accident. But the fall, the operation, the drugs, the new environment are all working together to push her over the edge. It is only time that will tell how quickly she slides now. I cling to the past, unwilling to visualize the future. What future? I can’t even face the present.