Given Her Heart & Soul to Caring for Her Son Who Had a Rare Condition, the Elderly Grandmother Weathered Through Fifty Years’ Worth of Hardships

The hardships of life, observed, translated…

As I was first married into this household, my husband’s grandmother had, just celebrated her eightieth birthday, and now, it’s eighteen years since, and grandma is almost a hundred.

After I’d married, I’d learned, that grandma had been, staying with her youngest son, our youngest uncle.  Since he was six, because of a high fever, it’d caused him to have brain damages, caused him to develop a severe psychological disorder, and grandma had been taking care of him for almost fifty years now.

One time, we were engaged in conversation, and I’d asked grandma, why didn’t she put her youngest son into an institution?  She’d said blandly, “Back then, your grandfather had once planned to institutionalize him, but, I’d gone to visit the facility, right then and there, I’d made up my mind, that no matter how hard times get, I shall, care for him myself, perhaps, it’s a debt I’d owed to this son from a previous life!”

My husband’s youngest brother passed through his life, without any worries or a care, a couple of years ago, he’d become, emotionally unstable, and would start screaming, and mutilated himself constantly, grandma, who’s very elderly by then can only put him into an institution.  These couple of years, my husband and I would, from time to time, drive grandma to visit, seeing how empty my husband’s youngest brother’s eyes were, on the other side was, grandma, who’d cried, and mumbled to herself constantly, and, this scene always had that heaviness, that burdensome feel.

Last year, my husband’s youngest brother died of illness, grandma told my husband to go to the land offices, to take his name off the household registry, when she’d handed me the registry book, I saw, that there was a yellowed page of a calendar inside, I was curious and asked, grandma told me, “This calendar page was the date that I’d sent your youngest brother-in-law into the care facility.”

After hearing grandma’s words, I’d started crying too.  An elderly woman who can’t even read, kept a yellowed page of the calendar, recorded down every day she’d been away from her child, from grandma, I bore witness to, how great the love and strength of a mother is.

And so, this, is from your observations, and, you’d gotten a firsthand experience of how great your grandmother-in-law’s love was, and how much trials, hardships, she must’ve gone through her entire life, battling with herself, and in the end, she’d still, shouldered up the responsibilities for caring for her mentally ill son, and that, is the power of love of a mother.