Sundays with Betty

I never read the book, Tuesdays with Morrie, but I gathered it had something to do with this guy who used to visit some elderly guy named Morrie, and learned life lessons and wisdom through his visits…enough to fill a book.

On Sunday afternoons (and other times, too), I often laughed to myself over the comparison to what I thought that book was about to my Sundays with Betty. They were…different.

Throughout my life, I've heard that if you're going through a hard time, volunteer! Take your mind off yourself! When my (now ex) husband and I separated, I was actively looking for places in order to take a break from myself. One day, when I was looking at the postings on my neighborhood listserv, I saw something that caught my eye:

ISO: Reader for My Mom

My 94-year-old mother was recently widowed, and has just relocated to Washington, DC, from Florida. She is legally blind due to macular degeneration, but her mind is sharp. I'm looking for someone who can visit her regularly and read to her.

I saw from the posting that her mom lived in the Methodist Home that was just a couple blocks away. Perfect! I loved to read, and I've had several experiences working with the elderly, and enjoyed them (in fact, at one point I was thinking of becoming a social worker and specializing in gerontology). I got in touch with the daughter and arranged to meet her mom.

For this first meeting, I brought The Paris Review: Interviews, MFK Fisher's journal, Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me, and the latest copy of The New Yorker. When I arrived, Betty and I chatted and I told her what I brought. She waved them away. "I don't want that stuff," she said, "I don't care about it anymore. What I would really like is someone to read me the opinion pages of the New York Times." I agreed, and we fixed on a day and time I would come every week (Sundays at 10:30 a.m.).

About a week later, I received a call from her daughter. Betty didn't care for the Methodist Home and was moving to another facility three miles away. Could I visit her there? Hmmmm, I didn't have a car, but I could see it was walk-able. Plus, I always walked with my friend Betsy early Sunday mornings, and she agreed to drop me off at Betty's afterwards. So, most Sundays, it was just the walk back home. Yes, I said, I can do it.

And so it started. Roughly. For the first two years, Betty harangued me.

"What?! What?!" she would say, cutting me off, "you're going too quickly!" Or, "speed up, why are you speaking so slowly?!"

"Honey, what speech impediment do you have?" she asked.

"I don't have a speech impediment, Betty," I answered.

"You don't have a speech impediment that's been diagnosed," she corrected.

Several times, she interrupted my reading with, "what's my daughter paying you?!"

"Nothing," I would answer, with a hint of wickedness, "I come here for free."

"Why?!," she'd demand.

"Because of your delightful company, Betty," I'd say. She'd wave her hand at me, dismissively.

One year, she said, "it's my birthday coming up."

"That's great," I said.

"What's great about it? It just means I've survived another year when I'd rather be dead."

"Well," I replied, "that's one way of looking at it, that's for sure."

"I'm having a birthday party," she continued, "and you're not invited."

"Good," I said, "that will save me the trouble of buying you a card."

Most of the time, her digging didn't hurt me. I figured if I had been an exacting English teacher  who was now blind, and a widow three times over, and an excellent needleworker and knitter , and lived somewhere far away from everyone she had known to a place where she knew no one and had limited mobility after a retirement filled with travel, I would be pretty farking crabby, too. And I was already feeling pretty low, so her haranguing suited me.

But, after two years, I decided that something needed to change. I dreaded the Sundays, and sometimes left a bit teary from her constant criticism. And I realized something else—Betty was elderly, not incapacitated. So, I started pushing back. I wasn't rude, but I was succinct. If she wouldn't let up, I would set the paper down and ask Betty if she wouldn't prefer to talk instead, or if she'd like me to try and find another reader, someone she could understand better. Slowly, she began to thaw. And slowly, we found our rhythm.

"Okay," she'd say every couple of sentences, letting me know she was following, "okay."

Then, if something passed her by, she'd say, "Take that again, please."

I would read the sentence again. Often, she'd say, "It's just the last word of that sentence that I didn't catch." I would repeat the word, spell it, then re-read the sentence. If that still didn't work, I would use another word. Sometime during this process, she would suddenly nod and say, "ah." And I would proceed to the next sentence.

I became a better reader. I learned to start out reading very slowly, so she had time to constitute what she heard into her mind's eye. Once she had a place to "start from," so to speak, I could pick up the pace just a touch. And I learned when she was closing her eyes to concentrate and when she was doing so to rest...and I'd speak more quietly and mellifluously--I called it my NPR voice. I would focus on soothing, no so much on enunciating.

Frequently, she would say, "tell me what he's saying, in your own words." I would paraphrase, she would consider for a minute, then nod and say, "I like the way you put things. The way you say it, it makes sense."

It felt enormously gratifying to be able to translate for Betty. She would correct my pronunciation from time to time, or she would compliment me when I would enunciate—just right—a particularly tricky phrase. Other times, we would go into the etymology of a word. Or, we would try to figure out what an arcane word might mean before I looked it up in her enormous dictionary.

We regularly read four columnists. Frank Rich ("let's get him out of the way," she would say). She would always refer to him as either "Frank Rich," or "Mr. Church." Both fit. Whenever I finished his lengthy missive, Betty would say, "well, as usual, he has a lot to say and doesn't mind taking his time."  Then we would move on to Thomas Friedman. "Where is he at now?," she'd ask. Then, we'd move to Maureen Dowd. "I can't make sense of her today," Betty said—perhaps unaware that she did so every week. "It might be because she doesn't make a lot of sense, Betty," I'd always reply, "and the sense she does make isn't worth the trouble." We'd always end on Nicholas Kristof. We'd call him "the Russian,"  even though, she said, "I believe that name is Polish."

Sometimes, we would discuss the columns, especially whenever it was election time. Betty and I had the same political opinions for the most part—we were both Hillary supporters, and when the nomination was clearly heading in Obama's direction, Betty hesitated. We had lots of heated talks about it. I went out of town the weekend before the election, so I missed a Sunday. When I walked in the door the Sunday after, Betty shouted out in triumph, "We won! We won!" I laughed and agreed. I asked her who she'd ended up voting for. Betty looked at me, offended. "Well, Barack Obama, of course," she said. "Did you see that NUT McCain picked for a running mate?!"

Betty was always confused as to my age. "Are you a junior or senior?" she'd ask. "I'm out of college," I'd tell her. "College?!," she'd reply, shocked. When I told her my age, her jaw dropped every time. Then she would nod and say, "well, you're still a baby."

Once, she asked me if I ever thought about getting married. I told her I had been married and no, thank you, I didn't think I would do so again. She asked why we divorced and I fumbled around, not really having an answer. She waved me off, "never mind, never mind. I already know. He was too stubborn." I laughed and said that was a good way to put it. Another time—and this is the best Betty story of all-time—she asked me some question or other about my ex-husband and I mentioned that he was Afghan.

"From Afghanistan?!," she exclaimed, practically levitating out of her chair.

"Yes," I replied, laughing, "from Afghanistan."

"Why did you marry him?," she asked.

"Because we were in love," I replied.

Pause. I could tell she was thinking, hard.

"Was the sex good?"

Later—four years later—we were chatting and I told her I had become engaged to a wonderful man named George. After she asked if I was old enough to marry, she asked "where his people came from." I said he was from New Jersey, and that his parents had emigrated from Hungary. She thought about this for a long while. Finally, she said, thoughtfully, "that should be okay, then."

Every week, I would walk Betty down to lunch before I left. I would tell her to have a good week, not to fall down (she had a tendency to do that), and then I would kiss her on the cheek. One week, she grabbed my arm and said, ruminatively, "you've been married once already, and some people would say that's enough." Pause. "But I say, good for you!" Touched, I thanked her. It was one of the nicest ways anyone gave me permission to love again.

Every December, we would exchange gifts. She usually gave me some chocolates, and I always gave her a big monthly calendar--one that she could read using her text-enlarging machine, which she called "my computer." Every month, I carefully updated the Sunday squares, writing, "Yes Jennifer" or "No Jennifer" if I were going to be out of town. Whenever I left her and a break was coming up, I'd tell her I'd see her in two weeks. "Is it on the calendar?" she'd ask, worried.

Though we mostly focused on the columns, Betty told me bits and pieces about her life, too. Over the years, I learned enough to just about fill a book: how her father sent her to college because he didn't think she would ever marry, how she lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, how it affected her when she suffered the losses of husbands, and a child. She lived an amazing life just by virtue of the history she lived through, but it was animated by her amazingly agile mind, and her very.strong.personality.

This morning, I picked up a message from Betty's daughter. Betty passed away over the weekend, peacefully, in her sleep. I didn't see her on Sunday because I was out of town.

I am sadder than I ever thought I would be. Even though she had been doing poorly, even though I knew she was ready to go. 


And, even though she was a grade-A pain in the neck a lot of the time, I'll miss my Sundays with Betty.