I am talking with my mother on Messenger.
“I’ve grown too old,” she says. “I never thought I would live to be 97 and then some.”
“You look younger for your age,” I encourage her. “No one will give you more than 85.”
“Really?” she smiles, hopeful. “So young?!”
I nod in response and smile too.
I watch her through the window, seated in her wheelchair and staring at her Samsung tablet as we video-chat. From time to time, she remembers that I am outside on the patio; she raises her head, looks at me, and smiles again.
With my wife, we arrived a week ago in Eugene, Oregon, and we are quarantined in an RV next to our daughter’s big family house. My mother has lived with them for 20 years, taking as much care as she could of her three great-grandchildren and the household.
My mother has always wanted to be useful, and despite aging, she still finds ways to continue being useful. She takes the laundry out of the big dryer and folds it. She loads and unloads the dishwasher. She feeds the dogs. Sometimes, she even secretly does chores that she is actually asked not to do. And for the rest of the time, she takes care of herself, does flexibility exercises, and reads e-books.
Every time I have visited Eugene, I have loaded tens of fresh books on her tablet. And every time I have tried to teach her Messenger, I have failed. But not this time. This time, she realizes I certainly must not, cannot get inside the house, and motivated all of a sudden, she learns to video-chat. It does not come up quickly, but she persists, and finally, she is online, video-chatting with her granddaughters in Washington and Canada. She is even browsing Facebook pictures and news!
Do you know what strikes me most in her story? It is not that she is online at the age of 97. It is not that she somehow manages to use and enjoy a device that does not understand Bulgarian, the only language she knows. It strikes me that if Covid were not around, she would have never learned Messenger! The limitations that Covid imposed on the two of us energized her to succeed where she always failed before.
Now, we still chat, even though I live 900 miles away from her in California.
