Old Nativity

At Christmas Eve mass and through the evening, I fell into a gap of time, where one time and another become the same time.  I was a young girl at Grandmother’s in Nesco, I was a teenager at Mom’s in Glens Falls, and I was a wife and mother here in Flint.  After gazing into the fire for ages of time, I tucked myself into a cold single bed but imagined I was sleeping on the cot in my mother’s family room—the wood stove room—watching the orange light flicker with Mom sound asleep, breathing loudly, on the couch nearby.  Tonight, in Flint Michigan, we’d made a great fire downstairs with Mom’s wood, wood stacked up on the deck by the back door which we carried in the U-Haul along with my inherited furniture.  The embers from that blaze would keep vigil long into the night for the baby’s birth.

Midge, Christmas in Nesco, late 1940s

Awake before the family, I drank coffee and read the daily Advent reflection in the booklet provided by the church.  The entry was titled, “The Christmas Mystery as Cosmic,” and the author explained that the mystery of Christ is larger than what we see visibly in the life of Jesus.  “Christ is already part of the physical creation.”  I know this to be true.  Christ is God made manifest to the senses in the cool breeze, the land flowing with milk and honey, and people after his own heart.  I’ve just finished teaching The Hebrew Bible as Literature and could cite many examples of “divine fluidity”—God taking on human form to engage with chosen humans or God speaking to animals, fish, and plants to enlist their help teaching chosen men important lessons.  Was the cosmic mystery of Christmas connected to my own feeling of being mysteriously connected to Mom?  The fact is, since she “died,” I’d felt different, changed, quivering on the edge of some major revelation.  What was it?  How, if at all, did that mystery, connect with Christmas?

Handel, in the oratorio, The Messiah, has an aria that connects Christ’s birth, death, and rebirth or resurrection that begins this way:  “Behold, I tell you a mystery:  we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed; in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye; at the last trumpet.”

When I think of the mystery of Christmas, I think of the way T.S. Eliot articulates the complex emotional experience of one of the magi who made the very long journey to Bethlehem, following the star.  That poem begins, “A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of year for a journey, and such a long journey / The ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.  As the magus narrates the journey, frigid turns to temperate, high places become fertile valleys, and travail turns to rest and peace.  “I had seen birth and death before but thought they were different.  This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.”  The place was “satisfactory,” the birth was just Truth, and although the wise men went back to their places, they remained on the Way because there was no other choice.  “No longer at ease here in the old dispensation with an alien people clutching their gods.”  The journey took this man to a place that poet, Elizabeth Bishop, suggests can never be fully comprehended or appreciated in the lived duree of human experience where 

“Everything” is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’: 

Open the heavy book.  (The gilt rubs off the edges

Of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

Open the heavy book.  Why couldn’t we have seen

This old Nativity while we were at it?

--the dark ajar; the rocks breaking with light,

An undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

Colorless, sparkles, freely fed on straw,

And, lulled within, a family of pets,

--and looked and looked our infant sight away.

This Christmas I am still beside my mother’s bed.  Her bed in the nursing home where she died.  I don’t like calling it her deathbed, because her death felt weirdly like a birth, and I am still looking my infant sight away.  My mother no longer exists.  I witnessed her death on the morning of May 16^th, 2019.  There is no such person.  Her passport has been cancelled.  Her bank account is closed.  Someone else is wearing her clothes.  But my mind has been and still is full of her.  I’ve journeyed to her bedside almost every day since she left us. 

“Grief means living with someone who is not there.” 

Who says so?  Grief means being occupied, visited, haunted, filled up with someone who is with you, in you, but who you cannot see.  I saw “this old nativity” on May 16^th, and I see it now (“—the dark ajar”) through the lens of my mother, Emmanuel. 

My mother, Midge with dog, Rex

Come to Bethlehem and see / Him whose birth the angels sing.

It was the middle of May.  I cancelled my pilgrimage walk and flew home.  Come quick.  She is dying.  I think it was a Wednesday.  I walked into her room and when she saw me her face crumpled up and she cried, “Mary Jo” … I think her arms reached for me.  “Oh, Mom.  It’s just another trip.”  How could I have said that?  Is that what she needed?  What followed was hours and hours of sitting by her bedside with her laboring for breath while the fluids filled her lungs.  She wasn’t unconscious, but she was struggling and not able to talk.  Sleeping.  How did it happen so fast?  Just two days ago, she’d eaten part of a banana and had a milkshake.  I left her that night because my sisters returned and Jennifer wanted to stay.  The nurses walked me out, telling me that I could sleep on their couch.  But I didn’t want to stay.  No privacy.  I wanted to be alone with her.  I drove up Route 9 and checked into a hotel, but I didn’t really sleep.  I was involved in her struggle.  When the text came from Jennifer asking me to come to the hospital early the next morning, I was ready. 

But was I fully in the moment?  It’s possible I checked my email before I left the hotel.  How could I have?  Why had I left the nursing home in the first place?  “I have to step away,” wrote Jennifer.  “I’ll be right there,” I responded.

The early morning sun was breaking through fog, and when I entered the room, there was a feeling of excitement, of sheer anticipation.  Jennifer may have told me some things about the night, but if she did, I don’t remember any of them.  I moved toward Mom, whose face was white and sunken, and her breathing was thick with mucus.  I had a good hour or two even alone with her.  I felt for her hand under the white bumpy spread.  It was warm, and I stroked it and held it, while I talked to her about my life, about my upcoming journey, about her journey, which I understood to be a continuation of the one she’d been making in her mind all winter.  “I drove to New Jersey.  I got into that old house.  It was so dark, but I found my way to Grandmother’s bed.  You’ll never guess who I saw?  It was that old country woman who said she remembered me from when I was a little girl.”  Mom was always running into people who remembered her, and she was always delighted by these meetings with people she’d known long ago.  I knew it was nearly time for her to set off, to “get going,” and I knew it before Patty, the occupational therapist said, “Sweetheart, it’s time” and before the hospice representative said there’d be little they could offer since “she is close.”  I already knew.  Mom and I knew something else.  This was just the beginning, the setting off, and it was always terrifying.  She sat with me when I was scared to go to England and later to Turkey.  “It will be so exciting,” she said before my trips; and, “I knew you’d handle it well,” in letters to me when I was away.  Now the roles were reversed, and it was me, with her voice in my mouth, saying “Mommy, it will be wonderful.  They’ll be so many people there to meet you:  Papa and Lillian and Ruthellen and Jesus, too.”  The whole gang.  I lay my head on her stomach.  I wanted to go back into the body that bore me, but I was the Mom now.  It’s okay Mom.  She coughed and opened her eyes.  Light brown ooze seeped out of her mouth.  I wiped her lip with a damp washcloth.  She looked at me and took a breath.  “There you go.  Good, Mom.”  I smiled as if I were watching an infant.  She coughed again.  Again, the deep look at me.  The ooze came.  No inhale.  Mom?  Mom?  Oh, Mama.  And I sat so still.  Here, Here, Here (and gone).  Here, Here, Here (I am).  It was crazy beautiful.  I couldn’t tell anyone what it felt like because I didn’t have the words and still don’t.  It just didn’t feel sad.  It felt momentous, mysterious, miraculous, powerful.  It wasn’t as if a hand reached down and took Mom’s soul away.  It wasn’t as if her soul ascended like a weightless star.  It was more like something settled on me—something comfortably weighty.

“When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, ‘Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.’ Elisha said, ‘Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.’ He responded, ‘You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not.’” (2 Kings 2:9-10)

Hours later after the family had gathered to sit with Mom, I helped the nurses prepare her body.  I pulled off her gray wool socks.  I gazed at the body I loved.  I kissed her.  She wasn’t warm anymore.  Even so, I didn’t want to leave her room.  I had the same feeling when we had to leave the church and go to the cemetery.  I didn’t want to leave the church, where she and I had sat side by side Sunday after Sunday and all the holy days, each knowing without needing to speak the depths of the other.  Intimacy with Mom had always meant occupying my place at her table.  I loved it.  But maybe “we” (she and I) were reborn the morning of May 16th into some new way of relating.  With tears in my eyes, I walked out of Mom’s room, behind the gurney and down the corridor.  I remembered back to the morning in January 1993 when she and I walked down another hospital hallway, after we’d witnessed together her mother’s death (or was it a birth).  I remember saying to Mom, “it doesn’t feel like Grandmom died.”  The attendants rolled the gurney with Mom’s body on it into the cold of the transport elevator and we went down to the back entrance of the nursing home and the waiting hearse that would carry Mom’s body to the funeral home.  After that morning, I kept walking.  I walked into the Adirondacks, trail upon trail.  I walked the borderlands of Scotland and England.  I walked to Holy Isle.  I walked for Mom.  I had two new classes this fall—classes that demanded I develop new, more intimate ways of relating to students.  I walked into the world with these students to work with seniors, to play with abandoned kids, to learn the history of Flint.  We walked for peace of mind.  Every time I left my comfort zone and wasn’t uncomfortable but recharged, I thought of Mom.  This new power I attributed to knowing her in a new way.  She was now in me, and I experienced her as an accomplice or collaborator in a way that I never quite did when she was “Mom” and I was “Mare-ee Jo.”  There is a tremendous power in witnessing a woman lay down her life … for me?  For us?  As soon as Elijah ascended in a whirlwind to heaven, Elisha picked up his fallen mantle, and he became another Elijah.

Midge, with me, Mary Jo, her firstborn at Glen Lake, Christmas 1965

Just as inexplicably as I felt Mom’s death was a birth, I feel her presence in my house this Christmas, a presence that helps me see the old nativity.  Emmanuel means “God with us.”  I feel my mother not only with me but in me.  Is her ongoing life a homely version of the incarnation?  Through this mystery, I’ve come to think that the religious aspect of an event is merely an unnoticed dimension of the ordinary.  I am surrounded by her things, and they trigger the feeling of being in other houses (hers and her mother’s).  But there was also this:  on Christmas morning, I had my coffee and was about to go upstairs to read when I felt a strong urge to just sit down and think about her and look and look deeply into the lights twinkling on the tree.  I remembered how we would sit together in her woodstove room drinking coffee waiting for the wood to catch and the room, which got darned cold at night, to warm up.  I felt the same relaxed feeling and leaned my head against my mother’s rocker as if it were her breast.  We are all babies.  Just as she needed to get back to her mother’s bed, I need to lean against her.  Maybe death was not only her birth but mine.  Into the world I come with thighs to shelter me, love to swaddle me, and many women’s hands to hold me up.  I feel supported.  Merry Christmas, Mom!  Merry Christmas worldlings!  Drink deep from the teat of the moment.  Feel its fullness.  Taste its rich sweetness.  Isn’t that all Christmas is about?  To see the divine in the ordinary things of our lives and to trust our feelings about them.  Emmanuel.  Mom with me.  Me with others.