Saw my old (Croatian) landlady: She had a bad year.

The other week when I was biking up to the beach I saw an older woman walking slowly with a cane, and since she kind of looked like my old (Croatian) landlady from behind, I slowed down to check if it was her and then stopped to talk with her when I found out it was her.

I had heard from a friend in the building that she had been battling cancer the past year, and I had even asked about her a few weeks earlier, since I used to see her all the time walking around the park by the beach where I go…   My friend had said she wasn’t going out walking like that anymore, but she was getting out again, and she would sometimes see her in the very early afternoon just sitting out on a bench by the park entrance.

So, I asked my landlady how she was doing and said I hadn’t seen her for a while, and she told me about her cancer and her chemo and said she had “had a bad year.”

I tried to be realistically positive about how she lived in the same neighborhood as a very good hospital where she could get all her treatments, and she agreed.

I also asked her about her grandkids, to get her to focus on the positive.

As for her walking partners who I always used to see her with, she said that everything changed there very quickly; one walking partner who was 80 died, and the husband of the other was very sick, and she can’t walk anymore since she’s always busy doing things like washing his sheets.

“But that is life,” she was like.  “You live, and then you die.”

She was also saying she worries about her husband, since all he does is get up and “move from chair to another.”

“He is 80, and looks like 65,” she was like “But he needs to walk more, this kind of life is no good.”

She then added that he said he worked 65 years and doesn’t want to work anymore.

“And he leaves his dishes in the sink!”, she was like.  “Fine, you do not want to work, but I also am old and do not want to work, and everything falls on *my* head.”

She also said to say hi to my dad, who she had met when I moved in to my apartment 8 years ago… 

 He had brought up the fact that he was Hungarian, and they bonded.

Right now, I’m planning to get her a gift certificate to a local bakery, so she can use it for whatever they sell, or pastries and coffee with friends or family, or even for their little ice cream counter, to treat her grandkids.  I’m going to get the office address from my friends who still lives in the building and tuck it in a card and ship it out ASAP, I think it will cheer her up a little.

She’s very tough but looks thin and worn.  It’s hard to believe that my friend who saw her 6 months ago said it’s an improvement, that if you saw her then, you thought she wasn’t going to make it.