“How do I look?” It’s a funny question coming from a woman with severe bed head, a drooping lip, prune juice stains on her hospital gown, and all manner of tubes and wires emerging from various parts of her person.
So I figured you were joking. Good one, Grandma. Leave it to you to make fun of yourself just days after a stroke left you slumped and alone on the carpet of your living room. Now, propped up in your mechanical bed in the neurological wing, it figures you’d be the first to fearlessly acknowledge the rumpled old-lady elephant in the room and snicker at her unkempt state. I smiled and waited for your next line; what would it be? Something funny. A facetious quip to show us that your spunk sure as heck ain’t paralyzed. “Am I about ready for the Governor’s Ball?” you’d probably say. Or “pretty as a picture, right?” Or maybe “a face that only a mother could love.”
But the quip never came. I stopped smiling. You weren’t joking. And as I sat holding your impossibly soft hand with your impeccably shaped nails, I think I realized what you really meant.
“How do I look?”