She stepped into our lives a long time ago. My dad had been a widow almost 15 years. Two of my three kids had been born and my sisters were both relieved that someone else would help care for dad-as well as jealous that this woman would displace them. This new step-mom took up the job of gathering her family and ours together and although we were all adults, weld us into a new unit. That was more than 40 years ago.

She has been widowed 15 years now. She has buried children and has suffered with friends, sisters and in her own life. She gave up her home when she fell. The hip cracked. She gave up her license when her eyes creamed over. She accepted the move to Assisted Living, but she is now too frail to stay there. She was in hospital when we went down to see her. "She's given up," they said down there. "Down there" is 1,300 kilometres south from Owen Sound, Ontario, where we live.

When we arrived at the hospital all the familiar smells and sounds greeted us as, wide-eyed we went to the room at the end of the corridor. Staff was busy, rushing here and there with needles, trays and charts, going back and forth to computers in the hallway and behind circled desks. Her door was closed. We tapped lightly and pressed it open. It swung back to reveal a bright window with a large white-sheeted bed in the middle of the room. Surrounding the bed were the inevitable monitors blinking signals and flashing numbers. Bags of fluid hung over the bed, dripping life into tubes that wormed their way under the sheets to an open port, a wound in this woman's withering body.

She turned to look. Her eyes were alight with love, welcome and excitement. How wonderful to be drawn in by her joy. She smiled. Someone had combed her thinning wisp of white hair, put colour on her pale cheeks and drawn lips. She was always proud of how she looked. She believed that the minister's wife should be the best dressed woman in the parish. Though weak and weary, she was still the attractive woman my dad loved years ago.

We held her brittle frame. She was like a tiny child in a big grandmother's bed. Eighty-five pounds now. Her arms were a mass of red bruises and black patches where nurses and doctors had probed and pricked and dug, seeking blood in the small tributaries that carried her life. A port had been finally plunged in her upper chest to stop the bleeding on her skin-stretched arms and hands.

Her little body hardly made a lump in the white blankets pulled up around her. The chill wouldn't leave. She never got warm, she said. It was 92 degrees outside but her body was like ice. Her cheeks were flushed, however, and her eyes sparkled with warmth.

"Her mind is excellent," the doctor confided, "but her body is very weak." We could see it. Her thoughts were quick. She was alert and honest. She expected others to be treating her like an adult. But folks came and went calling her "Miss Doris," or "Miz G," or more often, "Honey" and "Darlin." Folks used a tone of voice like they were talking to an innocent child. Too loud and too sugary. The sweet talk and cooing did not address who she was.

She did look like some sweet little old lady, but inside that aging body was the woman we had known all those years. She was still herself. She, the person we knew, was still there. Folks who did not know who she had been, who she was; who did not know the personality we knew, treated her like a cute little old thing. "She's so sweet," they'd say to us. "So suhweeeet!"

We knew her to be the woman who had suffered an alcoholic husband and fought for a divorce. She had worked full time and raised three kids. She had later been a preacher's wife for 30 years. She was the one who went with him from crisis to crisis, with a casserole or a chicken steaming with comfort. She waded into the deep waters of human life alongside her husband and carried the burdens of her people in her heart and in her prayers.

She was there to comfort when Franklin hung himself in the barn. She was there when Sybel's baby died and when her husband came home day after day with the wounds of his people tattooed on the walls of his heart. She was also there when the people loved her preacher and when they didn't. Both times were tough.

She was the one who, when the planes hit the towers on 9/11, decided that sitting in front of the TV was a sin. She got up. Made soup and biscuits and took them to her frightened friends and neighbours. She had always been the one who looked after the elderly and who arranged for the broken to find a place among the whole. She was the woman whose body aged with the marks of her service to her city. She was a preacher's wife with pride in being in the church.

That woman was still there in the bed, hidden behind the deep wrinkles and the bruised arms, looking out of a frail and ailing body with a clear and demanding demeanor. We stayed for several days. We remembered together the days of before. We laughed and gave thanks, sang softly some old hymns and prayed each night.

She told us that some months ago she had been in hospital again. One morning she was lying quietly in her bed, feeling very peaceful, very relaxed, very much at home in her self. She was at rest. Eyes open, trusting. A nurse came in and exclaimed that something on her monitor had become alarming. "I'm fine, I feel fine," she said to the nurse. "No," cried the nurse, "we need help here." Help came. Soon a pacemaker was implanted and "Miz Doris" was "saved." The doctor reported, "Its just that pacemaker that keeps her going !"

We tried to help family in town who carry the burden every day. Then we explored the next step from Assisted Living to the nursing home. We saw the home. We saw the staff calling aging people whom they do not know endearing names. We heard the philosophy about caring for the elderly and listened in on the sounds of the folks conversing with their memories. One fella in coveralls told me that tomorrow he would be helping bring up the tobacco from the fields. The leaves were ready for hanging.

When we started home again there were tears, and we held each other praying as we have always done. The broken, breaking body, legs skinny like a nine-year-old girl's, arms barely able to wave, shivered in the chill of her years and sighed in readiness for the next step into the familiar nursing home. She will be flattered with singing voices but not really known. It is the next step. She was accepting that and making ready.

It is all a part of being human. Our humanness includes being cared for by skilled strangers. Not known in the times of our helplessness. Feeling forsaken.

We long to be independent to the very end of our lives, but many will be led where we do not want to go by people who never knew us. That, too, is a way of being human in this world.

Our names are nonetheless written on the palms of Another's hands.