Grandmother Update

My mother called me a few weeks ago and told me "At lunchtime today, all of Bubbe's teeth fell out."

Oh?  You don't say.

I correctly assumed that there was more to the story.  These teeth were attached to an ancient bridge, which finally gave up and broke. 

Bubbe's paid caregiver popped her into a taxi and took her straight to the dentist.  Bubbe, being semi-demented, gave the dentist a hard time.  She resisted even climbing into the dentist chair, however eventually the dentist was able to examine her mouth.  Then she refused to consent to any procedures.  Stymied, the caregiver brought her back home.  Later, she told my aunt that the dentist had never even looked in her mouth - because she didn't remember that part.

The long and the short of it is that Bubbe has also not remembered to care for her teeth for quite some time.  They are a proper mess, and she's got a series of appointments to have most of them extracted.  She showed up at the family Passover ceder without her top front teeth, and was very embarrassed by this.  She held her hand up over her mouth every time she spoke or laughed.  Poor Bubbe.  She's having a hard time of it.   On the other hand, she seemed to be in high spirits at the ceder, and other than being slightly bonkers and having a hunched spine, her health is quite good, for a 92-year-old.

Now my other Bubbe, my dad's mother, isn't demented at all, at 96, bless her.  I swear her memory is better than mine.  She has obviously lost some bone mass, however instead of curling forward her spine has pancaked straight down.  So even though I need to lean down a little to rest my chin on the top of her head (I'm 5'4"), she stands up quite straight.  She's stiff and slow, but again, has mainly good health.

The last time I visited other Bubbe, she showed me something she'd made in an arts-and-crafts class: a cedar plate.  (During a Passover cedar, five symbolic foods are displayed on a special plate during the ceremonies.  You can use an ordinary plate, but some people keep plates made specially for this purpose.)  She told me she had made it out of mud.  She meant clay, but throughout the conversation she kept referring to it as mud.  I mean, I suppose that's not exactly wrong, but something about it tickled my funny bone.  "Then they gave us this mud, and as you can see we didn't have a lot of time to work with it.  That's why the edges of the mud aren't smooth."  :-)  Funny Bubbe.

So there you have it.  I will have to save up a lot of money for retirement, because if my genes have anything to say about it I'll live to see 100.