On a random weekend a few years ago, she couldn't find the eyeglass case so she asked me to look around her bedroom for her. She usually put the case at the foot of the bed so perhaps it fell off and landed on the floor. I got out the flashlight, got on my hands and knees and searched in vain. After we spent some more time looking around the house and in the car, she wondered if the case had accidentally fallen into the small trash barrel that was by her bed. Now her anxiety turned into frustration because I had just taken out the trash the day before and if her theory was correct, the case was now long gone. However, I didn't recall seeing it among the trash when I emptied the barrel. Surely even in my zoned-out state of mind, the eyeglass case would have caught my attention. But where was it?
She was convinced it had been thrown out in the trash and now she was having a bad day. As a caregiver, when the person you care for has a bad day, you have a bad day. This is partly due to the sympathy you have for their awful predicament but sometimes it's because they are in such a foul mood, it rubs off on you.
Soon, I found myself searching online for what happens if something of value is thrown out in the trash. Turns out, the trash company can look for an item at the transfer station if you call them and narrow the search by giving them the truck's route and time of pickup BUT such a search needs to be done within 24 hours. Unfortunately, it was too late for my mother's eyeglass case if it had indeed been lost in the trash. Still, part of me felt it hadn't.
I tried to calm my mother down by saying there really wasn't anything that could be done right now. If the eyeglass case had been accidentally thrown out, it was gone for good and no amount of complaining could bring it back. If it was lost somewhere inside the house, it would eventually turn up somehow. Well, that wasn't good enough and she continued to be miserable. She got on my nerves and I found myself repeating the words she used to tell me as a child: "If you have something nice, you have to take better care of it." I thought it was foolish of her to place the eyeglass case so close to a trash barrel.
After a few days, she resigned herself to the notion that it was gone forever and visited the needlepoint store to look for a new canvas. Unfortunately, they didn't have any good patters in stock for making another eyeglass case so she left empty-handed and feeling dejected.
A couple of weeks passed and then one night I heard her give out a yell from downstairs. While in the bathroom, she had grabbed a towel from the linen closet and out fell the needlepoint eyeglass case. Apparently, she had been folding the laundry on her bed at the beginning of the month and unbeknownst to her, the case was accidentally folded into one of the bathroom towels. My overjoyed mother said, "My prayers to St. Anthony were answered. He has never let me down. He may take his time, but he has always come through for me." Now every time I take out the trash, I make sure to check her barrel a little more carefully to make sure only trash is being thrown away.
I'm glad things worked out for my mother this time around but the story of her eyeglass case shows how quickly a caregiver can go from having a nice day to dealing with sudden catastrophes. I find myself always on guard for the latest crisis and that's a mindset that doesn't offer much peace of mind.
