Twenty dollar grace

My mother, who declared, “you are making the biggest mistake of your life“ when I married my husband, many years later adopted him as her “very own boy”. 

When she began to need more care, I was still working and he was recently retired, so my husband took on all of the duties that I wished I could...mostly doctor visits and the periodic changing of a lightbulb, after which she always called me and exclaimed how amazing he was that he could change a lightbulb that fast.

As she entered her 90’s and started having a greater need for medical appointments and procedures, they developed a bonding routine. After every doctor appointment, she would complain vigorously about the treatment, he would listen, and then they would seek solace in the one thing she said was keeping her alive - a cheeseburger Happy Meal and an apple pie.

She was a fiercely independent woman, and so whenever my husband took her to McDonald’s, she would pull a twenty dollar bill out of her wallet and announce that lunch was on her, and he could keep the change for helping her out.  My husband would get her settled, go to the counter, and then he would pay for lunch with his own funds. At some point during their lunch, he would secretly slip her twenty back into her wallet for their next trip to McDonald’s.

I think that that twenty dollar bill made it back into her wallet for more years than I can count. And it was waiting there after her last doctor visit when she sat across from my husband at lunch for the last time and declared that at 95, she was done.  A week later, she transitioned from this planet to the next life.

After she died, we went through her wallet and found that twenty. As we laughed at the memory,  I looked across at “the biggest mistake I would ever make” and realized something about his gesture towards her all those years.

My husband was not hiding her twenty to save her money. He was giving my mother a sense of independence and preserving her dignity . He was letting her love him in the only way that she knew how – treating “her boy” to lunch to thank him for his kindness. And he was showing my mother grace - one twenty dollar bill, one cheeseburger Happy Meal, and one apple pie at a time.