Hello, everyone! Greetings from a hot Kathmandu! Here’s a little update on one of the elders you’ve come to know and love.
Bishnu Aama is the woman you know as “Black Aama” from the book. She’s moving around better this year than last year. When I arrived last year, she’d just come back from a night at the hospital, and she didn’t want to leave her room at all. If we encouraged her to come outside to eat or get her meals and tea, she just pointed to the back of her left hand and explained that they put a needle in her hand and she was very sick and so she couldn’t leave her room. (I still find this oddly amusing.)
Finally, last year during my visit, she began to venture out. This year, she’s moving almost as well as before her trip to the hospital, and she’s in good spirits again.
When she saw me out in the courtyard, greeting people the day I arrived, she yelled from her new room just off the courtyard, “Babu! Babu!” (“Baby! Baby!”) Even with her dementia, she still knows her baby when she sees me.
She asks me the same questions as always, and almost every day: Am I married? Do I have my parents with me? (Translated: Are my parents still alive?) Do I have children? (Her response to my reply of “no children” remains the same as it was in 2017: A disappointed, sad, clucking of her tongue, and “So sad,” in Newari.) As before, though, whenever I show an elder a photo of our rescued dog, they aren’t sad about anything. They just love our rescues. No joke. Everyone loves our latest rescue, Gypsy. Here’s a photo to prove why.
See what I mean? Even elderly Nepali and Newari people, who think dogs are dirty and don’t belong in a house, always melt when they see our girls.
Now, if you’ve read the book, or if you’ve been with me on this journey and have managed to keep everyone straight, you’ll know that Bishnu Aama keeps a very old flip phone tucked in the folds of her skirts. Her son is in Qatar, she says, and he will call her any day. (Recall that her son abruptly married his wife’s sister, and the two left the country, leaving Bishnu Aama behind to be neglected by his first wife.)
Last week, Pushpa gave me an update: Her son and his second wife have come back to Nepal, and live right there in Pharping, just a short distance from the elder care home. He drives a local bus, and Shaha and Pushpa have told him that his mother is living there, but he has refused to come visit her. Doing so, I suspect, would mean he’d have to face the financial and emotional responsibility of caring for her. Yes, I restrained the Chicago in me, which wanted to hunt him down and drag him by his hair to the elder care home (because dragging him by his ear doesn’t sound painful enough to elicit remorse on his part).
This is real life, folks. Real life. Not some fictional, made-for-television (do they even make those anymore?) dramatic series.
Your donations help to provide a loving home and lifelong care for Bishnu, and when you buy the book, fifteen percent of the proceeds go right into the homes in Nepal and Guatemala. I thank you, from the bottom of my socks (because the bottom of my heart never seems deep enough – and yes, I got that saying from an old Peanuts cartoon).
Thank you to everyone for all of your support, and for loving these elders the way I do.
Overheard on a podcast recently:
“If I accepted what people say, I would have been living the life of other persons. I would have been the passenger while somebody else drives my car.”
~ Siquoyia Blue, Blu Alchemist podcast
