Caring has no age…
Stories are hardly ever like this…
Dona Teresa has 72 winters etched into her skin, her hair and her memories.
Dona Teresa looked after her mother, the houses, the garden, the hens and the rabbits. She was never ill and cured everything with little prayers and herbal teas that her grandmother Maria had taught her to pick in the fields.
She got up every day at 6.30 in the morning and never stopped for a second.
“She ran on Duracell batteries,” says her niece.
One day Dona Teresa felt unwell, fell in the bathroom and had a stroke that left serious after-effects. She cannot speak and can barely move. She follows us with her eyes… but it is an empty, distant look.
As soon as we walked into the room, we saw a very thin lady, head bowed, but with an energy “held back by the pain”!
“Life is cruel. A mother isn’t born for this! She’s the only girl I have! What will become of me now?”
“Do you think this is normal? A mother having to go through this?” said Dona Maria Alice.
Dona Maria Alice is 88 and now has to care for her 72-year-old daughter.
She talked to us but did not look at us. She was always in “caring” mode!
“The world is upside down!” the mother kept saying as she lovingly fed her daughter a yoghurt.
“You have to eat, my girl! You’re so thin! You always ate well, my love!”
At the grand age of 88 springs, she never stopped for a second. Her great fragility was hidden beneath the will to care, to love, to watch over her only daughter!
“My life has fallen apart!
She was the one who looked after me. She cleaned my house. At night she brought me soup!
And now, look at this! Oh my God!”
It felt like we were watching a film we had “never seen”!
The world was now upside down. The mother, already tired and with her “bad bones”, was now caring for her 72-year-old daughter.
The river that “seemed to be flowing to the estuary, to the sea” had turned back on itself.
But Dona Maria Alice “put on the cape” of the super mums and “came back” to care, to love.
That’s what mothers are like. They put on the “capes” of every hero and, through ice, strong wind, storms and terrible pain, she makes her way every day to the room of “her girl”.
From the door, we said goodbye to Dona Maria Alice. She was wiping her daughter’s face and talking to her as she did.
The daughter did not move; her left arm was paralysed and she could not speak. I don’t know if she understood that beside her was a SUPER MUM!
A mother who, despite the pain and the limits of time, loved with every letter of the word LOVE.
From a distance, the world really did seem upside down.
But…
It was as it always had been. A place of care, warm and snug with a mother’s tenderness.