Exhausted, part one

"She was tired. It was as simple as that. This life she loved so much had been lived, all along, with the greatest effort. She closed the door again. To hold herself still, she held her breath."

-Ann Beattie

I'm at my mother's house this weekend, and between the bursts of feeding her, cleaning her, moving her, and humoring her, she sleeps. And sleeps. And sleeps some more.

While she sleeps, I cook, I putter, I do the laundry, I amuse my child, I catch up on blog-reading. And I open cabinets and closets, desks and drawers, finding oddments at every turn.

This afternoon, I found a small metal box - like an oversized Altoids tin, but plain - and inside was a tiny clipping, just the last paragraph of an Ann Beattie story that ran in the New Yorker in 1983.

It floored me. I think my mother's been tired for her entire life. Tired being a good girl growing up, tired being a diligent college student. Tired getting married right after graduation, tired raising three children on no money while her husband was in the military and later in law school. Tired buying a fixer-upper of a house, tired being the bitterly divorced mother of three. Tired scrimping and saving, tired being a de facto single parent.

And now, she's tired because her body has turned on her. No longer battling exterior forces, she sleeps and sleeps while the silent inner demon gradually eats away her flesh, her brain, her life. Tired.