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.