Last Rites

I don’t remember the fog that morning.  I remember being happy to be called.  Reluctantly, I’d left her bedside to find a hotel and to give Jen time alone with our dying mother.  But my sister texted me early:  when can you get here?  I can throw on clothes and be right down.  That’s what I did.  When I arrived, the aides had just turned her and she was trying to settle down after what my sister later told me was a difficult night.  The food and drink cart with pots of cold coffee and packs of peanut butter crackers was still there, but I noticed very little.  All my focus was on her.  Jennifer left.  It was peaceful and I remember a light feeling as if today was the day we would set off on our journey.  Me and Mom.  I was always her ticket out of that “prison,” and I wonder if she was waiting for me for that reason.  Why didn’t she slip off during the night?  It was possible, I suppose, that she needed me.  I was her first born.  She wanted me badly and always told how she’d cry in the months after she married but got her period.  No baby.  Not this month.  Then, she had me, and I’ve been her baby ever since.  I tried my best to talk, to monologue, despite knowing that too much talk annoyed her.  I lay my torso on her.  I stroked her head, swabbed her mouth.  Her breathing was labored and I watched the plateau of her tongue rise again and again toward the roof of her mouth.  I told her about my life … things she might not want to hear.  I tried to let my feelings flow (as I never quite could when she was healthy and we played our roles).  It’s all about flow.  Just the day before, when I’d first arrived, I sped up the highway, through the corridors, and to her bedside.  I took her face in my hands, and she cried, “OHHHH.”  “Oh, Mama,” I said, “it’s just another journey.  It’s just a trip, Mama.  It’s going to be wonderful.”  She settled down.  Here I was the morning of the next day, ready to set off.  I think I even told her the memory of sitting in the kitchen, being so afraid to go to Turkey, watching her turn French fries in oil, and feeling so stuck, attached, frozen in my position at the table, being there for her after Pop died.  “But you encouraged me to take the leap.  You gave me the push.  It’s like that for you now, Mom.  Leaving always feels scary like you are jumping off the edge of the world, but there will be lots of people there to catch you.  You won’t fall.”  I kept flowing, talking, singing.  My brother arrived and left the echo of his male voice in the room.  I imagine that to her his voice sounded both like Joe (Mom’s husband) and Bud (Mom’s brother).  I spoke about New Jersey and the many trips she imagined taking all winter long—back home to her mother’s bed.  She raised her head and looked at me with total trust in her blue eyes.  She coughed heavily, brown ooze dripped out of the corner of her mouth.  I wiped it with a cool washcloth.  She seemed to stop breathing.  My own heart stopped or seemed to.  She started to breath again, and I smiled, “Oh, there you go, Mom!”  She coughed again.  Again, the brown ooze.  Her eyes opened, looked at me, and then all was still.  Face to face.  Mother and daughter.  Did my river of words carry her somewhere far away?  Did she commend her spirit to me, to God, or to the journey?  The bond that was there all along, too powerful to be spoken or even acknowledged eye to eye, was finally and fully affirmed.  She looked at me.  I didn’t turn away.  In her eyes, I became a full person, a Mary Jo, her daughter.  I loved her through the change.  Mother, the car is here.  Mother, I’ll leave the light on.  Oh, Mother, it’s just Mary Jo.  The early petal fall is past.  Shall I scoop them up?  Shall I hold on futilely to the beauty that rains under the arms of your crabapple tree?  In the end, I left the pink tears in the blades of grass on the dark and windy night when I had to sit at your table one last time.  I loved you, Mama.  I love you still.  You grew me, bore me, raised me.  I raised you, too.  And now, in some weird way, we deliver each other:  you give me my life again, and I give you to a fullness of life I feel but cannot put into words.  I was the desperately wanted first, and I have desperately wanted you all my life.  You slipped through my grasp.  You refused to be known in words.  But in the last moment of life, I was with you—just the midwife, the old countrywoman, the girl who helped with the wheelchair.  “Mary Jo, it’s just your mother.”  Just.  You were humble in all your human dealings.  I promise to follow your example.  Wherever you are, here I am.

You are loved!

Mourning All Night

Asleep and not asleep
I try to make it to where you are
asleep and not asleep
in a cedar box
trying to move you
when I finally get up
my feet ache
and I remember pulling off
your gray socks
and rubbing the white balls
of your feet
(shaped by years
teaching in high heels)
before they got cold.
Your spirit left its house
and you are on a road
somewhere
heading north
to the lake
or south
to New Jersey
seeing the beauty
passing spring
leaving me to yearn
for company
sitting here
alone in tears
hoping you are happy.

How could the villagers of Sarashina
abandon their ageing mothers
among the rocks?

Dear Mom ...

Dear Mom,

It’s been only four days since you set off for the undiscovered country and, Oh!, how I miss you.  In the letter I wrote to you for Mother’s Day, I was recalling our trips to the wildlife refuge in Brigantine, New Jersey.  As our car would creep along the dirt roads that traced the fingers of land reaching out into the bay, we’d startle mother geese.  As they stood up, dozens of babies with yellow fluff for feathers would scatter in a panic.  Mom!  Where are you going?!  Now I know how those scattered babies felt.

Mom's crabapple in full bloom!

You often told the story about Grampy being laid out in Ruth’s parlor, and how you would talk to him while he was laying there in his coffin.  You even bumped into him with the vacuum cleaner.  It bothered you that you could never say what he was like after he died although you worked with him, scooping cranberries and picking blueberries, all your life.  It’s no wonder you felt at a loss for words:  Grampy was a world unto himself … and so are you, Mom.  He was your hero, and you are mine.  My mother, my mountain. 

I walked up Buck Mountain yesterday to let your departure sink in.  Nothing sunk in except my feet in inches of muck.  It was nice to find you out in that wilderness.  I had to cross a couple of beaver dams, and I thought about the hours we spent watching a colony of beavers working on the road to Indian Lake.  I also thought about my effort, sitting in Mr. Bennett’s ninth grade art class, trying to paint one of the mountains behind Queensbury High School—tree by tree.  I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t paint the forest without each tree.  That approach, as inefficient as it was for representing a mountain in paint on paper, is all about giving attention and love to each small thing.  I learned that way of seeing and being from you.  Just as I was and am unable to paint a mountain, I am also unable to say what you are like.  Any effort to do so feels like trying to hold the wind in a net.  Impossible.  You are too AMAZING.

“Live and let live.”  That was the lesson you reiterated to me in countless ways throughout our lives together.  Don’t try to pin people down with your words or with your mind.  Let them bounce, let them smile like blueberries, let them surprise you.  They will come around.  But you didn’t preach because you knew that words alone are not enough to touch a child or to bring an idea to life, to cause it to put down roots so it can develop and blossom.  Only a lived example can teach the beauty of labor, the fun of competition, the necessity of loyalty, and, most important of all, the vitality of a curious mind.  You gave all your children, in and out of the schoolroom, one heck of an example.

You didn’t like the facilities you lived in after you broke your hip:  The Home of the Good Shepard and Fort Hudson.  You called them prisons.  But it’s to your credit that you found an escape route.  You regaled your kids all winter long with stories of your drives to New Jersey.  You told us how you broke into the old house (without a flashlight!) and found your way to your mother’s bed.  “There was this old country woman, she had an apron on, and she remembered me from when I was a little girl and she nursed me, fed me a bottle.  She said, ‘I’d know you anywhere.’  She kind of watched over me, and when she left, she promised she’d see me again.  Oh, I had the sweetest sleep in that bed.”  With that story, you drew us all into the excitement and the sweet peace of regaining childhood, of making all things new, of going home.

My mother, my mountain, it seems fitting that you died under a photograph portrait of your favorite president, Abraham Lincoln.  Free at lastl!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty I’m free at last!  You’d planned with Patty, your Occupational Therapist, to go sky diving.  If George Bush could jump out of a plane as an octogenarian, then so could you.  Although you never got to live that adventure, you were beautiful and courageous as you took that big leap into God knows where, trusting that mother, sister, Nala, Joseph, and, of course, Jesus, were all there to ease your landing. 

It’s been really hard being in Michigan while you were struggling.  But every time I’d get ready to fly home to see you, I would think how your New Jersey family members, Lillian and Frank, Ruth and Philip, would get in their cars and trucks and drive north—fast!—every time you delivered one of us.  It was important to be the first to see the new arrival.  I, too, felt like I was rushing to a birth and not a death.  Because you were NEW each time—you had new stories, new friends, new ideas for adventures, and new foods you wanted to try. 

In the end, though I cannot say what you are like to my own satisfaction, it doesn’t trouble me.  I will go on thinking of you as my green, bejeweled, lovely, and ultimately mysterious mountain.  My necessary angel of the earth since in your eyes I see the earth again:  cows’ velvet noses, Fort Edward crocks with blue birds, Lancaster Rose teaspoons, morning mist on the lake, whippoorwills at twilight, trumpeter swans on the Batsto River, and every single tree on the mountainside.  Nice to remember that “mountain” or “mounty” was my sister Katie’s first word: not “Mama.” 

Stay with us always, mother, like the mountains.

Love always,

Mary Jo (your oldest)

Born Again "Midge" (my mother's nickname was Midge because she was a small baby)

My mother is dying.  She has been dying slowly since she was rendered immobile by a broken hip.  At the thought of her actually dying, I feel panic.  I want to rush home and cling to her—a childish impulse:  No, Mama, stay!  I won’t let you go into the dark!  The other part of the impulse is to go there, sit with her, tend her anonymously, taking my feelings out of the equation for once, so as to bear her into that other world the way she bore me into this world.  Women are made to bear; and bearing is a hunkering down, a waiting, a toleration of intense pain for the sake of life.  Can I do this at a distance?  Can I walk to Holy Island with my mother?  Can I take her there on my own two feet?  She needs someone’s feet.  She was born Catherine Alice Walker, and like her mother, Lillian, she loved to drive—tractors, cars, anything.  She also loved to ski down mountains.  She loved to travel.  The disorder of her mind came on when she could no longer stand up and walk.  Mom, if I go on this pilgrimage (in England), I will go to carry us both out of this world to freedom.

What may have been Mom’s last trip happened over the winter months, and it was an imaginary journey but very real nonetheless.  She had told me about it on the phone, but the most memorable recounting happened when we were sitting in my rental car in the dark of a very cold February night.  I’d flown in from Michigan to visit, and we had gone out to the Anvil Inn.  The evening had had something magical about it:  the success of getting Mom in and out of a car, pushing her wheelchair along a crowded bar, and making it to a table where we could drink beer, eat nice food, all in front of a bright orange fire.  We both felt joy.  Were the human beings who helped us out of the restaurant and into the car really just human or gods in disguise?  Even on the short trip out, just down the road, we felt amazing things.

I wanted to prolong our trip together, and so I parked far from the entrance to the nursing home.  Mom always thinks it’s a school and knows she doesn’t belong there.  We stayed far away.  I lit her Kool cigarette, cracked the window, and looked at the full moon while she raised the cigarette to her lips (she found them!), took a few puffs and then shakily raised the long ash to the edge of the window.  “Mary Jo, have I told you what happened, I mean where I went recently?”  You mentioned something about a house, Mom.  “Well, it was the strangest thing.  I drove down to New Jersey and somehow I got into the old house in Weekstown. It was dark and I didn’t have a flashlight.  But I made it into Grandmother’s room and got into her bed.  And then I saw this old woman who was familiar.  No, I didn’t know who she was, but she said, ‘I would recognize you anywhere.  You look just like you looked when you were a little girl.’  She told me that she fed me a bottle when I was a baby.  Then, she went away, but before she left, said she would see me again.  I had the soundest sleep in that bed.”  When she told me this story, my mother’s face was filled with light and her voice was free and lilting with wonder.  While she spoke, the black kernel of night in which she and I sat, felt utterly safe.  Evidently, she took this trip repeatedly through the winter months, because one day, an aide found her on the floor.  She had slipped off her bed and, when asked what happened, muttered something about driving and an old house with an open window.

This adventure story gives me hope.  Even with her dementia—maybe because of it—my mother had found a way to free herself from the loneliness and humiliation of life in a nursing home.  She’d been able to go on a trip, find her way to a comfortable place, and even—so it seems to me—make up a personal religion with a god who is a mother, gentle and nurturing.

Back in Flint, walking around the arboretum on an early spring day, I was thinking about my mother’s travels.  I wasn’t blind to the new things all around me:  bluebirds, pileated woodpecker, skunk cabbage, wooly bear, and last but not least—a doe with a spotted fawn.  But I couldn’t let go of my mother’s story, of the thought that maybe Mom told me her Truth.  In that simple story was something profound, pure thought that put Mom beside herself.  Her working brain had split her in two:  she was the helpless child (old age is second childishness) and the godlike Mother in the sky looking down on her baby.  She created (or maybe saw in a dream) the Matriarch who would bear her back to the buried sources of life?  I thought birth and death were different, the bookends of our lives, but Mom was telling me that they are very close … maybe one and the same thing.

I thought of the image I made of my Grandmother after she died.  I'd found piece of board shaped like a gravestone, trash-picked from someone's garbage on the Cambridge street where I lived as a graduate student.  I knew I needed time away from my dissertation to grieve and was overwhelmed by the mystery I'd witnessed.  Mom and I were at Lillian's bedside when she took her last breath, and Mom was talking about Weekstown school, where her mother taught children from kindergarten to eighth grade in one room.  After a night of struggle, Lillian had waited for her daughter and granddaughter to arrive before she died, so that her soul could leave with us.  I was convinced that his was the Truth.  We walked out of the hospital shocked that she could die.  We followed the hearse carrying her body south to New Jersey and buried her in Pleasant Mills with its cedar trees, tea-colored stream snaking along through this quiet paradise.  We took Lillian home; but I knew she was with us.  Mom is travelling back to Jersey, to Weekstown, on her own, but I know when her time comes, she will come with us, too.

 I thought of another image, created by an old therapist of mine, in which the mature female psyche cares for the inner child, tends it, like a seed or a fetus, always there in the inner core of being.  Could the loss of adult reason given Mom access to this deeper Truth?

  

Finally, I thought of Kathe Kollwitz’s images of Death holding a Woman.  Death is gentle and maternal.  Was the country woman Mom saw, who wore an apron and remembered having given her a bottle to drink, her own version of Death or even … God?  Why not? 

Mom was a devout Catholic all her life, but now at the end, she shows no particular interest in the things of Religion—at least, no interest that is perceptible to me.  It is people and bonds and acts of kindness that move her.  “Mom is happy,” reported my brother.  “She smiles and says hello to everyone who passes.”  She is still trying to love and be loved.  When her own mother, who lived with us, was deeply demented, that’s what she said she wanted, “to love and be loved.”  No wonder a personal, interpersonal, relationship is Mom’s new image of comfort, home, salvation.  It’s natural.  It’s even possible that our ability to feel the presence and protection of a loving God comes from our earliest childhood memories of being held and nursed by the godlike mother.  That’s where Mom is now.  In the lap of a country woman, hopefully sucking down the sweet milk of peace between full breasts.  I will always remember the night we sat in the dark parking lot of the nursing home when she "read" me her own story from the hornbook of her heart. Our minds drew close because each of us was drinking from the perennial source of all life—the mother-well.  She was telling me about being fed and put down for a nap, while I was listening to what might have been my last bedtime story.  A mother and a child.  I still see and will always see her blue eyes with no lashes bright as headlights in that dark night.