She was now 101 years old, and existed in the current daily world at least some of the time….on the whole, her brain was still her friend, though every so often long dead relatives came to visit and she had to admit it was good to see them. Little did it matter that no one else could see them…they had not come to visit the others anyway…they had come to say hello to her. She had missed them, though she had never met most of them. Her family had always set an extra place at the Shabbos table, so she opened her
considerably agile ancient mind and welcomed all, whether they were real or not.
Ever since she had a brief and relatively benign brush with a stage one cancer, taken care of without chemo or radiation….Charlotte had once had the white coat syndrome to beat them all!
Her strategy was to never go to doctors if she could help it, and she kept joking with all her friends that she was undoubtedly dying from “27 different kinds of cancer”, accompanying her genuine fear with a hearty laugh…until her therapist – her brilliant and insightful therapist pointed out that if she did indeed have 27 different kinds of cancer hiding in her body, she’d be dead by now….they shared a good laugh…and somehow, magically, through years of therapy and more years of therapy, Charlotte’s fear of death and doctors never really disappeared, but it did tamp down in its heated fervor, so that she had developed a truce with her terrors.
Death was inevitable…as was disease and pain and sadness and grief over the brief candle
that was life….and the fact that her life continued to be a wonderful one, free of pain – well, relatively free anyway, since how does a 101 year old body avoid pain….thank god for Tylenol and Alleve, her daily companions…yay for painkillers that she could buy over the counter or online to be delivered directly to her door….with her painful knee soothed, and her aging teeth cooled down, Charlotte could face another day and sit like a queen above the inevitable.
She absolutely felt her fate in what she did not fear…because fear, she realized early on in her childhood., a century ago, ..fear is the biggest killer of them all. As long as she could feel fearlessness, she could continue her life of creativity and joy…because beneath it all, Charlotte did feel the joy of living.
That is why she avoided as much pain as possible, and though she could understand how alcoholic and drug addicts clung to their substances for dear life, she herself never felt the need for any of the harder stuff…over the counter tablets were just fine and dandy with her..
So she continued to face her life with all the brave and daring an old woman could muster….one day at a time…one fear at a time…that way, she could endure.
She often fantasized about how and when she would die…it was actually a daily preoccupation with her, and she would wake up thinking of various scenarios, each one more soothing than the last, as she envisioned the sunny, funny, laughter-filled last moments of what could have been a painful life but was actually a soft and cushion-y one thanks to the miracle of all those harder drugs she avoided all her younger life…in the end, drugs to ease her pain and keep her laughing were all she cared about…and also, there was her devoted grandson, Charlie.
She had practically raised the boy when his mother (her daughter) had gone off on her bi-polar fantastic journey into unreality, so Charlie considered his Busia (Polish for “grandmother”) his real mother. They lived hundreds of miles apart, but he came to see her as often as his busy work schedule would allow. And when he did visit, he and Charlotte- always Busia to him- would sit for hours on the sofa clinging to each other as if they were each other’s life raft.
Busia was pretty sure her end was near, but she did not fear it.
In fact, she looked forward to long leisurely teatimes with all those long lost relatives who had perished in the camps.