My Mother, My Mountain

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth--

The Sweeping of the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity--

Mr. Quirk read this Emily Dickinson poem aloud in my senior English class when I was still in shock from finding my father dead.  No one dared to speak about the space left at the table, the great gap that prevented me from swallowing food for weeks on end.  Mom modeled marching on.  If she cried, she was very private about those tears.  But Emily Dickinson said, in only eight lines, everything that I needed to hear.  To cope with loss or avoid coping, human beings "bustle": they sweep the hearth and the heart.  Okay.  So maybe my family wasn't that strange.  This stowing away of feeling is ritualistic, part of the grieving process.  It is possible that the poem helped me understand my mother's stoicism instead of merely feeling outraged by it.  Furthermore, because the poem so quietly and sparely stated just what happens "the morning after death" and because it ends with a dash, it seemed to ask for my input, maybe even invited shouts of anger.  "No!  I will not put my love away.  I will not have grief that way ... not if I can help it."  At the time, I didn't dare stay with the poem long enough to think it through.  I heard it and knew.  It's true.  It just is.  Skittish like a frightened deer, I leapt away.  In the same way, I stole a furtive glance at my stone-cold father--Dead--on the pull-out sofa bed.  The existence of poetry as the real grace and the only meaningful speech in a very hard world was established from then on.

My father died suddenly.  My mother is dying slowly.  She fell and broke a hip, and she has continued to fall ever since ... pneumonia and urinary tract infections are weakening her.  She can barely handle a cigarette and has trouble feeding herself.  "She's not the same person we grew up with," said my brother in a phone conversation from the ER where Mom was taken after a bout of nausea from nerves.  As I listen to him, I think about how there are many ways that people begin to sweep the heart even before death.  Putting a parent in "Assisted Living"--a waiting room for the inevitable--is part of the clean-up job.  I didn't disagree with my brother, but I felt he was wrong.  Mom is very much the same person.  In her eyes--lashless and sky-blue--I see the bright ongoing everness, that same pinprick of absolutely lasting light .  Inside the body or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging, and in Mom there is a fierce tenacity.  The day after her ER visit, I attempt to take her home for a party with family and neighbors in her kitchen.  I had my doubts whether she could make it up the front steps.  I positioned the wheelchair so that if she could raise herself up enough to grasp the railing, she could, just maybe, pull herself up the two steps, and I'd be at the top to catch her.  She gripped the railing and with who-know-what reserves of strength, lifted herself.  One step.  There you go, Mom.  One more.  She was up!  Oh me of little faith!  Her arthritic hand clamps down on the wrought iron railing that runs along the top of the porch.  "Let go, Mom, I'm right behind you.  You gotta trust me.  Just let go."  She doesn't let go, and a flash of frustrated anger is eclipsed by pride in her ability to hold on ... for what? ... for the blessing of more and better life.

When I visited Mom last week, I stayed in a cottage on Indian Lake.  My dad died in a similar cottage just down the road.  I struggle to remember his face, the sound of his voice, the feeling of his presence.  I didn't intend to forget him.  I tried to resist putting love away.  And I don't want to prematurely box up my feelings for Mom.  After tossing around on the waves of a rough internal sea and listening to rain all night mixed with calls of loons coming through the open window, I went out for an early morning walk in mist and drizzle to search for my parents.  My cousin Melissa remembers that after my dad died, his daughters and nieces stood on the porch and wailed like loons.  On this particular morning (38 Augusts after Pop went away), I saw three loons swimming close to shore.  Why three?  I know that paired loons winter separately and return to the same lake.  They find each other and spend the summer diving and mating.  It would make sense for two loons to be trolling the shoreline, but there were three.  Suddenly I see Mom's face as it appears when my daughter and I walk into her room at the Good Shepherd.  "Oh, thank God," she always says, visibly relieved that we've found each other.  Normalcy restored, the three of us head outside to let her have a "relaxing cigarette."

I spent much of the vacation week gazing at the mountains and appreciating the way they hold the lake year after year, unchanged.  They stay because they are made of hard, hard stuff--granite bedrock, visible in the havoc of rocks in river beds and in the boulders that litter the footpaths.  Mom is something like my mountain--hard and ultimately mysterious, yet somehow promising ... in the way that the barren central highlands fated for Abraham were preferable to the lush Jordan valley chosen by Lot.  Having come of age in the foothills of these Adirondacks, one idea persists:  dominating the mountain, conquering it by racing to the top, is not the best way to know it.  Every mountain has a difficult-to-access inside.  I walk around it like a Buddhist monk.  I visit it, with no ulterior motive, as I visit friends.  My brother and sisters and I grew up making our own ways and places inside living mountains.  We learned early that to turn over a rock is to find an orange salamander, to sit quietly for a minute is to invite something to happen, to watch any part of the natural world is to see it arch its back and bristle.  And so it is with the maternal mountain.  I know from observation that this is, without a doubt, the same woman who fought the Niagara Mohawk workmen, who came into our back woods to cut down the tallest tree--our axis mundi, our tree of life--around whose trunk Pop built us a tree-hugging fort.  Made partially in Her image, we, her daughters and son, will not (even if we should) let go.  We will fight on against fate and one another, struggling (hopelessly perhaps) for an elusive blessing, waiting for water to flow from rock.


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p.s.  to my brother Jim (and any other siblings who might chance upon this):  after reflecting on what I've written, I realize something about my rejection of Pineview (the cemetery where he's buried).  To me it seemed like an anonymous or impersonal place, and there was something hard about seeing his name on the stone.  Now I see that what was really impersonal and hard was the way his death was handled.  Why should it have felt somehow taboo to talk about the love we felt from the living man?  That enforced silence has made it hard for me to take hold of the reassuring hand that was always ready to pat my leg or hold my shoulders and to feel the love that beamed from that ruddy face with the broad gap-toothed smile.  Joseph Kietzman was a real father who loved his children and wanted, more than anything else, to go to the lake with them.  I hope that all of you have had an easier time finding your way back to life before and beyond our great loss.  I am learning to understand--too late--that just as each of us experienced his death differently, we've each had different relationships with our parents.  What I write may not be true to how you have felt, but that should be okay.  I have to hope that that awareness may one day transform the gridlock of rivalry into love.