She had lived with us since before my older sister (now 97) was born, our grandmother. But the time came when she could not be left alone. She would get lost in the three-room apartment, and frightened. My mother, in her 70s, was still working full-time as a nurse. the youngest of my sisters was studying ballet and seldom home till late evening. Our mother saw no other choice: Baba had to go into a nursing home. Baba, we called her, Babute, Baboliuk.
She spoke no English. Fortunately, there was a Lithuanian place, run by a Catholic religious order, in a suburb of Chicago. On the day after Christmas, 1965, we went to visit. We found her sitting in a chair next to her bed in the room she shared with another old lady, looking out through a window at a bleak flat landscape--a snowy field and a pond covered with ice.
A sister put the bouquet of pink carnations we brought into a vase and set it on Baba's bedside table. The flowers glowed in the room where almost everything was white. Gesturing toward them, Baba said: "They should bring me joy, but they don't."
What else transpired during that sad visit I don't remember. It was the last time I saw her but these words of my grandmother's have stayed with me and they come back to me often now as I myself approach the end of my life. When beauty no longer brings joy, surely we are finished.
It's not true for me yet. There is a rose bush outside my kitchen window that blesses me with its loveliness and fragrance.
Photo Credit: ID24453953©Grummarek/Dreamstime.com