Did I do that?

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She needs to go visit her soon to be 98 year old sister. I used to be able to send her by herself. These days either it's me who can't imagine sending this fragile person by herself (even though she will be escorted from flight to flight and elsewhere in the airports in a wheelchair), or this fragile person has become so incredibly dependent on me and is very much like a child who's too young to travel by herself; or it's both, or it's neither. ​

Where her sister lives only smaller planes fly. That doesn't make me feel great. 

Is her dependency all my doing?

Is it a result of life during a pandemic? Is it that hyper attentive "stage mom" in me? Or is it genuinely who she has become? I used to let her go outside by herself. She would stroll around the block and sit way out of view in her own little world paying attention to nothing and no one. She would buy several ice cream candy bars and bags of chips and eat them all. Then I forbade her to leave this block. She would still go to the corner gas station's store and buy loads of candy and pain meds. Then I forbade her to go to the gas station's store. 

One morning, coming home from my morning walk I bumped into a stranger who has lived on this block for at least a year now. He stopped me to tell me my mother asked him to go into the store and buy her $20 worth of candy. He said she took crumpled up tissue out of her pocket, opened it and there was the $20 bill. She handed it to him, a stranger to her. He said no he would not take her money but offered to buy her $2 worth of candy. He let me know it felt good to help a little old lady, but he was worried about her approaching people she didn't know. Me too.

I forbade her from going outside by herself from that point on. Now she is fully dependent on me. She seems comfortable seeing me outside as she walks around in her small little circle (it's all the independence I give her now). Now I do wish we had a yard she could go out to that I could watch from indoors. I wish she was more independent, more lucid, more of a thinker. She's not, or I am limiting her somehow. I do feel like I have a role in all of this. I'm tired.