She's so grateful....

She lives in a council bungalow which is stuffed with photographs including an aerial view of a farm. She sees my eyes stray to the picture and gets it down for a closer look. It's the farm she and her husband, ten years dead, managed for forty years. There are lots of women like Cissie in this area. She spent a lifetime working alongside her man, up at dawn, working on the farm and cooking for the men. She is tiny and wiry and seems welded to her cross over apron and she is broke. A lifetime of hard graft but the farm was rented and when her Gwyn died there was no choice but to leave. She was allocated her bungalow and she moved with the minimum of fuss, coping as she had coped all of her life "I just get on with it". The heavy farm furniture wouldn't fit in this doll size house - she has an armchair and a dresser and a single bed from the farm, the rest is cast off, make do, without history or charm.She talks of life on the farm, up at dawn and fighting every day to make a living but the spin she puts on it is all about how lucky she has been, what a wonderful husband she had, and how much God has blessed her. There was no chance of a pension or savings, it was hard enough to pay the bills so here she is, living her last years on the basics and "just getting on with it"
She is riddled with arthritis, she walks slowly, leaning heavily on her walking frame and you can actually hear her poor old bones creak as she moves. I met Cissie on shopping day. Her groceries had been delivered and left on the table and when I arrived she was transporting it, one item at a time, on the tray of her zimmer, into the kitchen where it was easier for the care staff to put in the cupboards she would never reach again. She didn't want to be a bother. I fought a battle royal to get her to let me help and when I put her washing on the line she acted as though I had carried out an act of extraordinary kindness.
Cissie has one son "a wonderful boy" who lives away and works as a teacher. "It's a hard life he has, girl, too much hard work" she says with no detectable note of irony. She has three beautiful grand daughters and their pictures are duly brought forth for admiration. She says her daughter in law is an angel. She doesn't see them often but they ring every few days and she says she is blessed and so, so grateful. Grateful is her watchword. She finds the fact that people come to look after her needs, to help her dress and to cook her food and to do the things her twisted bones no longer permit her to do, nothing short of miraculous. She cannot get over her good fortune. She thanks me over and over and refuses to believe that I do this job for any reason but my incipient sainthood. I stand to leave the poor little room and she touches my face with a gnarled hand and says once more "thank you girl, you and your staff are angels, I am so lucky."
I leave feeling humbled and privileged to have the opportunity to know someone like Cissie. The shine is taken off this feeling when I speak to the Team Leader for the area the next day. I declare that I want to take Cissie home and adopt her as an antidote to the stress of the job. The Team Leader laughs when she hears how much I enjoyed my visit. Apparently Cissie greeted her in tears when she arrived this morning. She had been awake all night worrying because she thought my visit meant that the Council felt she wasn't trying hard enough to do things for herself and she was going to have her care taken from her. She felt she didn't deserve the help....