Talking is easy.

“There was the time when my mother who was old and sickly fell down in the bathroom. When my brother heard about it, he scolded me for letting my mother have such a fall. He wondered how I could have allowed her to fall down when I had just one person to look after. I told him that those who do not have to look after the old folk can complain because that was easy. Sometimes things just happen. There is no way you can prevent it,” she told me.

Earlier to this, she was relating about her own painful fall in which four front teeth that loosened and almost came out from their gums. Apparently, it just happened as she neared the little drain beside her house. She fell forward to have her mouth crash against the cemented area. Of course, she cried pails of tears but recovered sufficiently quickly to get her brother who was living nearby to fetch her to the hospital to have her badly swollen lips stitched. No kissing for a month because it certainly was terribly painful. However, when the doctor advised her to have the four teeth extracted, she refused. She wanted to save those four teeth. ‘Imagine eaving a hue gap in frun of the mouth.’ So, she quickly made an appointment to see a specialist dental doctor at the government clinic where she had been having her teeth attended to to have them crowned. Luckily for her, the specialist attached the teeth back in her gums. After that she was not to take solids, only soft diet. She was saying things just happened. It is certainly not that we want it to happen.

So, there are many things in life which is not up to us to decide. Call it fate or karma. Whatever it is, things just happen and there is nothing much that anyone can do about it. Therefore, especially when it comes to responsibility of looking after an old relative or some weak, perhaps sickly, person, we should think twice before we attach blame on the caretaker as, more often than not, it is not the fault of the caretaker.

So, we should be slower in pointing the accusing finger. Otherwise, there could even be injustice as the very person who has put in the most time and effort as well as love not only does not get any gratitude but also has to bear the wrongful curses or accusation of those who could not understand the difficulty of looking after the aged and infirm due to their not having experienced such duties, responsibilities and problems.