The Lift Chair That Came Home

The couch

I called her cell phone. It rang five times and went to her voice, bright as a new nickel. Hi, you’ve reached Brenda, leave a message and I’ll call you right back.

“Brenda, it’s your mother,” I said. “I’m home. Call me.”

Then I made the mistake of the day. I walked into the front room, turned around with my walker, and sat down on the couch.

It is Gene’s old couch, green, with cushions that have been sat flat by forty years of Sunday football. The seat of it is about seventeen inches off the floor. I know that now because I have had occasion to measure.

After a hip replacement, your doctor gives you rules. You don’t bend past ninety degrees. You don’t cross your legs. And you don’t get up out of a low seat without something to push you the first inch, because the new joint does not care to do that work on its own.

That was the whole point of the chair. When you press the button, the seat tips forward and carries you up and out, until you are standing with your feet under you and your hands free. It was the one thing I owned that let me get up in my own house without asking anybody.

I rocked forward on the couch. I rocked back. I rocked forward again and my hip told me, in plain language, what it thought of that idea.

I did this four times over the course of an hour and forty minutes. My phone was in my coat pocket, and Arlen Cutler lives across the road and would have come in his socks.

I did not call him. I had stood on that mat and decided I was not going to be a woman who needed rescuing from her own furniture by suppertime.

What I did instead was pull the two throw pillows out from behind my back and push one under my left side, then the other under my right. It took eleven minutes and I said several things Gene would have blushed at.

When I was sitting about eight inches higher than I started, I got my hands on the walker and stood.

I stood in the middle of my front room, shaking a little, and looked at the four dents again. I thought, well, Millie, there is the difference between want and need, and I have just measured it with a tape.

What the chair was

I should tell you how I came to own it, because the whole story turns on that.

In November I went out my back door with a basket of wet towels and the third step had a skin of ice on it that I never saw. Gene would have salted it. Gene had been gone two winters by then and I had not yet learned all the things he did that I never counted.

I lay in the yard for most of an hour, until Arlen’s wife Peg looked out her kitchen window and saw the towels. The hip was broken clean through. They had me in a bed at Knoxville by dark and under the knife by morning.

I want to be fair to my daughter, so I will say this first. Brenda drove forty miles each way for eleven days. She slept in a recliner in my hospital room for two of them, and she brought my own pillow from home, and she fought with a nurse about my pain medicine and won.

When I came home she stayed three nights. She made me a pot of chicken and noodles that lasted a week. She is fifty-four years old and she is, most days, the kindest person I know.

That is why I have never been able to explain this to anyone who wants it to be simple.

The trouble began after she went home. I could not get up out of the couch, or the bed without a good deal of trouble, or the toilet at all without a raised seat my neighbor Peg lent me. I sat for six hours at a time because I could not face the effort of rising.