She has always taken great pains to make my favorite cakes and dishes for Thanksgiving, Easter, and Christmas. She makes me a personal pan of stuffing without chicken broth, even though she claims she'll never understand why I'm a vegetarian. Whenever we were celebrating anything growing up, she and Papaw would take us to Red Lobster or somewhere similar. For birthdays and anniversaries, they like to buy or make thick fudgey brownies and mound ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate on top. When I spent a month at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, Meme made me a big box of homemade fudge to share with my new friends--I was insanely popular that day, even though I ate much of the fudge myself. When I would spend the night with them as a child, they'd cook a big supper and then have popcorn with melted butter afterward, followed by ice cream. When I used to house-sit for them, they'd get me a pantry full of chips, Lucky Charms, Little Debbies, and cashews. Since food is tied so closely to Meme's relationships with me and others, it's no wonder that she also has considerable issues with food.
I've seen pictures of her when she was younger, and she was slim and gorgeous. She looked like Liz Taylor--the resemblance is uncanny. She wore big black beehive wigs and tight bell-bottom pants. She put on weight slowly over the years, and by the time I was born, she was pretty heavy. Some of my earliest memories of her are of her talking about her latest diets. She did a green bean diet for awhile, where she ate green beans all the time. If she wasn't hungry enough to eat plain green beans, the diet reasoned, then she wasn't really hungry. Later, she tried the Sugarbuster diet. Atkins. South Beach. Still her weight continued to rise.
I could see why. You only have to watch her eat one meal to see that her portions are huge, everything's cooked Paula Deen style (she's from Arkansas so most of her meals aren't completed without cornbread slathered with butter, or at least deep fried and covered in salt), and she eats like she's in a trance without knowing what she's intaking. She loves buffets as much as I do, and she always has donuts or coffee cake or cookies on hand.
Even so, she was still pretty. Before she retired, she was stylish and active, even if she was big. But once she retired, it was like she made a nest in her armchair and never left. She stopped swimming and they closed their pool. She stopped going to Vegas for their every-few-months trips because she had trouble fitting in the airplane seats (gee, that sounds familiar). And slowly she began to do less and less.
Now, she has terrible back problems. That's what she says, anyway. I believe that she's in pain, but I think the problems are more weight-related than back-related. I know, I know: I hate physicians who assume every problem with an obese person is nothing more than their weight. But in Meme's case, I think she got so big that moving became a burden, so she stopped trying. I know how she feels, because I was very close to that myself.
My grandfather now has to push her around in a wheelchair everywhere she goes. All 460 or so pounds of her. She got an electric wheelchair, but she doesn't like that as much because she can't get close to her slot machines (they still drive to local casinos since she can't or won't fly to Vegas). She needs help getting to the bathroom and standing up from her chair. It's not old age--she's in her 60s. She just became immobile. She can't put on her own shoes and she hired a housekeeper to do the chores. Her hairdresser has to make house calls because she can't go to the salon. My grandpa is so afraid to leave her home alone and risk her falling that he has to call someone to stay with her if he wants to go to the store or run an errand.
When she was in the hospital last year, they didn't have a bed that could accommodate her. They actually had to call an outside company to deliver a heavy-duty bariatric hospital bed. When it got there, the auto-inflating mattress kept failing. They had the tech out twice and I could tell that he was doing everything he could to avoid telling her that she was too big for the bariatric bed. (That's why I know how much she weighs--they made me try to fix the bed and I saw the weight. For some reason they think that because I can program their cell phone, I should be able to figure out any type of technology. I wish.) They let her keep her own mumu on because the hospital gowns wouldn't fit her. They have to take her blood pressure around her wrist because the cuff won't go around her upper arm. She acts like none of it bothers her, but I can only imagine the embarrassment she must feel.I never wanted their senior years to be like this. I dreamed of them retiring and having more time for the things they used to love doing--fishing, boating, camping, shopping. Now, they can't even go out to dinner because Meme thinks it's too much of a hassle and it puts too much of a strain on Papaw.
That makes me really sad.
The only good news is that I'm pushing myself in the opposite direction this time. I really was starting to pick up some of her habits--asking my girlfriend to get things for me, choosing to stay home instead of going through the trouble of going out and risking not fitting into a booth or being stared at in a crowd. I'm happy to think that my senior years will be spent doing what I want to do without being constrained by my size...but is it too late to help Meme? She's the most stubborn woman I've met, excluding myself.
I've done all I can, and I'm starting to give up hope that she'll ever take the initiative to get healthy again. I feel like she's resigned herself to living out her final years like the mom in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and that makes me want to cry. I had almost resigned myself to the same fate...the only difference is that I feel like I still have time to turn my life around. I wish I could say the same for her.
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