We need to see all of life's road

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Her feet are cold and swollen and sore. She lies in a hospital bed, her legs elevated higher than her heart. Every morning her toes are painted with some antibacterial solution, then wrapped in small sausage-like pieces of gauze. Next her feet are shrouded in white. From her ankles down, she looks like a mummy.

The problem is circulation. Blood is not getting to her feet. Her arteries, once freeways, have been reduced to narrow roads. In places the roads are impassable. Her heart pumps but the road is closed, deserted like Route 66, once America's most famous highway. Her feet are so tender that the sheet has to be draped above them, not on them.

A person walks the circumference of the earth three times in a lifetime. Someone told her this. She believes she's walked at least this much. She wonders if she's worn out her feet walking, if feet are given a certain number of miles and she's used all hers. She wouldn't be surprised.

She lies in her hospital bed, an 84-year-old woman, who suddenly - it happened so quickly - can't walk alone, whose sight grows a little dimmer every day, who doesn't hear quite as well as she used to, whose exterior is falling apart. And people looking at her see only this: a tired, old woman.

What they don't see is what's right underneath the white hair, what lives inside her body. Like old cities buried under new ones, who we were exists right under who we are.

This old woman is a young child, a pretty blonde, a striking brunette, a comely matron with salt and pepper hair. She is a daughter, a wife, a mother, a friend. She dozes in the middle of the day. She winces in her sleep because the pain trails her even there. "It feels like lightning," she says. "It's a bolt that travels through me." But under the pain, under the white hair, under the now, she has strong, sturdy feet that carry her from morning to night. She races all over Glasgow on those feet. She jumps rope. She plays "peaver" (hopscotch) and hide-and-seek with May Kirkwood and Bessie Williamson and the Wotherspoon girls. She walks to school, Provanside Higher Grade School, every day. I

t is an uphill journey. If she runs she can get there in 15 minutes. But mostly she walks. She loves to walk.

When she comes to America, she walks all over New York City. She walks instead of taking a bus or a train, pocketing the travel money because she gives her paycheck to her mother. She walks to work and she walks home and she walks up the stairs of her flat and she stands on her feet and sets the table and helps her mother make dinner and cleans up and irons her brothers' shirts and pants for the next day. If she goes out at night she walks then, too. And when a young man crosses the Atlantic to woo her, she walks away from him and toward a young man here.

When she marries and moves to Weymouth she has only one car so she walks to the store and she walks with her children and she walks just to get around. And when she is in her 70s and returns to Scotland, she walks the hills of Edinburgh and then she visits Glasgow and walks the streets of her old neighborhood and the person with her, younger by 37 years, has to ask her to slow down.

Now she can't walk to the bathroom without help. It comes to this. Legs. Feet. Heart. Breath. This mass of flesh and bones and blood grows old and wears out.

She never thought she was pretty, but she was. She had an old boyfriend who loved her until the day he died. She loved her husband with her whole heart. This is what you want people to see. Not just the end of the road, not just the ruts and the patched tar and the overgrown fields where towns once flourished, but the whole road, the long, winding, tree-lined, busy thoroughfare, that looks, when you're young and healthy and traveling down it, as if it will last forever, but comes to an end for us all.