Ms. Betty

I'll go ahead and warn you that this is not a happy post. In fact, I debated writing it at all. But I process things through words. Good and bad. So you are not expected to read the following - I just had to write it. 

You see, tonight Mom and I went to stay a shift with Ms. Betty in the hospital. 

I started taking piano lessons from Ms. Betty when I was nine and lived next door. I still remember tripping across the yard to her house that evening, a shy and neurotic little 4th grader. And she was completely sweet and enthusiastic and I liked her right away. 

So over the next years, she cemented my love for music. Not through all the theory exercises and classical pieces - though those were a part of it - but through her own passion for playing. One night she was trying to teach me to play "with feeling," and it just wasn't getting through to me. She finally said, "Anna, this is a waltz. The men are in top hats. The women are in lovely dresses. But the way you are playing it, they are also wearing lumberjack boots." I thought this was hilarious. And suddenly I understood what it meant to not just play the notes, but express them. 

Somewhere along the way, she became my second mother. I would run to her after a fight with my mom, and she would somehow manage to make me feel that she completely understood me, and not say anything bad about my parents. She came to see me in plays and cried with me when my cat died. For nine years, she was a weekly constant in my life, a safe place (even when I hadn't practiced).

So Jim and I have still stayed in touch, because we are practically her adopted children. But school and life get in the way, and before I know it months have gone by and I get a phone call from my mother saying that Ms. Betty is in the hospital, and the pneumonia is not pneumonia, but cancer in her lungs and brain and spine. And I surprise myself by breaking down and crying. 

Jim and I visited her before Thanksgiving. I crawled up beside her in the bed, and we spent a solid two hours laughing and talking and remembering, and went away lighter. Ms. Betty is stubborn. Ms. Betty will beat this thing. 

But things are not looking so good now. Mom and I took a shift this afternoon, and Ms. Betty's sister-in-law met us outside the door, and warned us about the pain she was going through. And I thought I was prepared, but it is not a good sign when just hearing about the suffering makes your face crumple into tears. She could not talk, and was in a lot of pain, and I just had to cry for a while before I could go in. 

But go in I did, and now I am strangely thankful. I cried a lot, especially when it was just Mom and me. I was not, after all, prepared to see someone I love in pain. But things calmed down, and I knelt by the bed and held her hand and talked to her when she woke up some from the medication. 

And she said my name. I do not know why that makes me weep to the point of no words. But I do know that it is grace. Grace that she knew me, grace that she was able to form the sounds, grace that I was able to sit there and whisper "I love you, Ms. Betty", and give back some of the care she showered on me these past eleven years.