Lucy and Ethel

I'll call them Lucy and Ethel for reasons that become obvious to anyone who sees them together. They are two aging widows alone. Lucy is in her 90s, and suffers from increasing confusion and balance problems. Ethel is younger, age uncertain, and does her best after having a stroke some years ago during an operation for a brain tumor. She doesn't suffer from confusion as much as from blonde-ism, from the way I see it!

Between them they have half a mind, on a good day.

When one of them is ailing, the other comes in lieu of family as moral support. They lovingly nag the other into getting medical help, if needed, or will sit until all hours of the night so the ailing one is not alone in time of need.

One day Lucy fell as she was going into one of our public bathrooms. Her walker remained in the doorway as she landed on her back. Her head left a dent in the wall behind her. She repeatedly asked her rescuers what had happened, but refused to go to a hospital. Ethel appeared and nagged and nagged to no avail, Lucy was not going to the hospital.

A few weeks later, Ethel was having palpitations. She sent another resident up to her apartment with management to find her pills. None could be found; apparently she hasn't had a prescription for several years. Lucy was adamant: Ethel needed to go to the hospital to be checked out.

In her staggering speech, Ethel replied, "That's what I kept trying to tell you when you fell, and you wouldn't go!" They argued for hours, but Ethel stayed home.

Yesterday, after several days of increasing confusion, Lucy went to the hospital for tests. Ethel spent the day circling her walker past my desk. "Any word?" I'd tell her, no, and her lips would tighten. "I tell her the same thing I told my husband. 'It's a good thing I love you, because I hate you!'"

If you ask Ethel if she lost her husband, she'll tell you no, he's at the cemetery right where she left him, her eyes twinkling the whole time she speaks. In her mind, I am sure she'll never lose her friend, Lucy, either. But her heart still worries; you can see it when her lips tighten as she looks out the front door before circling back around the atrium.