Easier that Way

Anna no longer recognized anyone. She had lived on the top floor of her two flat in Berwyn, Illinois alone until the age of eighty-nine.

Her son, Leonard, lived on the first floor because it was easier for him to get the accordion and speakers up one flight of stairs instead of two.
Anna always made it easier for everyone, especially Leonard, the musician. Perhaps, she wondered at eighty-eight climbing to the second floor with her arthritic knees, it had been a mistake. Too late to change anything now.

Her husband died twenty years ago. Her youngest son passed ten years earlier. Leonard’s wife divorced him and his daughters rarely visited. So it was just the two of them, mother and Sonny, as she called him.

At eighty-nine, Anna spoke about returning to work at Brachs Candy Company. She had been a factory girl before her marriage. “ I can work. It will do me good,” she yelled aloud to nobody.

One day she went for her daily walk down Ridgeland Avenue to Cermak Road and headed for the old Troy Department Store. No problem except the store closed five years prior. She managed to return home okay but couldn’t get up the second floor stairs. Instead, she went into Leonard’s flat and never made it to her own place again.

When her granddaughter came back unexpectedly from New York for a visit, she found Anna tied up in bed. She didn’t recognize the old, feeble woman with gray hair. She had always died her hair red. At first she speculated it was someone else. But then the old woman looked into her granddaughter’s eyes and said her name. Both of them started crying.

“What the hell have you done to her?” she yelled at her father, who was not a tolerant or even tolerable man.

“ I have no choice. It’s easier this way. She wanders,” he answered without shame, remorse or sadness.

It took a couple weeks but Anna was moved to the Bohemian Home for the Aged. A few months later her granddaughter visited again and found her watching television with others. They all looked heavily medicated. At first Anna gave no response when spoken too. But a flash of recognition swept over her face when her granddaughter started to sing a children’s song they had shared when the girl was young. “ The wheels on the bus go round and round..” Anna smiled and said her granddaughter’s name. A true gift for them both.

It was the last time they would see each other. Anna died from a stroke a few days later. It was just easier that way.

— Mugsy