My Mother and Her Wheelchair

My mother couldn’t walk for the last five years of her life. She had terrible arthritis in her back, and she couldn’t stand up straight enough to walk or do much of anything.

But my mom got around — somehow — in an old rubber-tired wheelchair that she got from some charitable organization in Sun City, Arizona, where she retired to. She would shuttle around her small apartment in that wheelchair, move from the bedroom to the kitchen, and spin from there to the living. If she had to run an errand to the bank or the supermarket, she’d had a local volunteer service pick her and her wheelchair up in their van and take her where she needed to go. Once there, she would push her wheelchair where she wanted.

Every time I would visit her in Sun City, Arizona, I would always watch a lot of TV with her, and we would see these commercials for electric wheelchairs. Scooters they called them, I think.

I would say, “Mom, you should get one of those things, one of those scooters. It would make your life a whole lot easier. You could go out on the sidewalk and ride up and down the street. You could talk to your neighbors, get some sun. You could even go to church on Sunday mornings. It might take you a while to drive your electric wheelchair there, but you could do it. Imagine church. You haven’t been there in 2 or 3 years because you’re embarrassed by your old, rickety wheelchair, but one of these electric babies would have you smiling and gliding through life.”

She would listen to me going on and on like that about these electric wheelchairs, and she would just shrug.

She was Polish, born in what she called the old world, and she figured that electric-powered wheelchairs were just another modern con job, like that super spiffy can opener the people bought because it was shiny and advertised on TV and had moving parts.

She spent four, long years pushing those cracked and broken rubber wheels of her old-style wheelchair with her hands, and when her hands in that last year of her life got too tired to move her along, she just sat there at her front window, looking down at the street and dreaming about walking.

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This is my latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish Daily in America.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/moja-mama-i-jej-wozek-inwalidzki-my-mom-and-her-wheelchair/
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