What the Commercials Tell Me

Today, I sit at the kitchen table at my Mom’s house, the house where I grew up, and listen for the bed alarm to go off in the other room. It is a helpful thing, the bed alarm. My Mom is sleeping now, so I can take a minute here.  But she can wake up at any time, and is so unsteady now, that if she gets up to move to her chair by herself, she could fall.  Adding a broken hip to a brain tumor? That would be bad. It is my second day here at my Mom’s. My sister will be over in a few hours to take over. We continue to take turns caring for Mom, our nights and days running together.

The TV is on all the time now. It is the soundtrack of my days. My Mom needs to sleep, and she wakes up if the TV is turned off; silence seems to bother her.  What’s more, when she is awake, it’s what she likes to do. She used to be a voracious reader, but doesn’t seem interested in books anymore.  I blame the tumor. I try to tune out the commercials that drone on in the next room, but I am not doing a very good job of it. Consequently, I am learning that I have scads of problems that I wasn’t aware of before this immersion in daytime television began.  For example, I didn’t realize that I should feel bad about the skin on my neck and chest, that other women my age are horrified about this, to the point that they have given up wearing blouses that expose their horrific, wrinkly selves.  Who knew that I should feel bad wearing my favorite summer shirts?  Or that I should think twice before baring my legs? There’s evidently a product for the skin there, too, and famous actresses who use it.

Also, there are lots of ads for a nationwide network of plastic surgeons who are running summer specials to treat one problematic area of your body for free! Until mid-September, that is. You could pay to have your tummy reduced and get your love handles done for free.  Or get your sagging chin lifted and have your arms toned for free.  Now that I think about it, my chin isn’t what it used to be. And clearly, there must be additional parts of me that need attention, too, if a two for one special is such fantastic news.

All these commercials play on my fears about growing old.  They command my attention, badger me to act, tell me to invest my time and money in slowing the process.  Through all this, I try to remember that this quest for youth comes from my small self that wants to be loved and esteemed and thinks that wrinkles and fat rolls will get me tossed aside.

The irony is that as these messages drone on, my Mom sleeps peacefully in front of the television.  She is walking through her last days on this planet, and the constant stream of commercials that float around her are just noise now.  They can’t touch her anymore, not that she ever cared much about all that anyway. She is so beautiful now. Her wrinkles are beautiful.  I am so lucky to be here with her.

Being with my Mom is helping me see how misguided that small self is, the one that freaks out about aging, that thinks for a minute about actually buying that wrinkle erasing cream. The truth is that death is meandering toward every one of us.  That used to worry me. Honestly, I’m still not thrilled about it. But it does give me perspective. It helps me realize that it doesn’t matter how much lotion we rub on our skin, or how many two for one plastic surgery procedures we receive. Flawless skin and toned tummies won’t save us. One day, all of us will die– somehow, somewhere. What matters is that as we go through out days, we know we are loved every moment by a Love that is bigger than we could ever understand or imagine. That we are held, and that from our first breath to our last, we are never alone.