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.  

   

Mary Jo I Nothing Am

Road headed toward Argyle, New York

        The moment I’ve been waiting for all my life with my mother happened yesterday on the bend in the road that runs out of Fort Edward heading toward Argyle.  We were parked—she in her wheelchair smoking—after I’d lifted the front wheels down one small step.  What happened?  She saw me for who I am.  But she didn’t know I was her daughter.  To her I was some very kind stranger with whom she could share pure love and simple joy in the moment, leaving a happy meal in a dark restaurant and coming back into the world of light on a warmish spring night in a place—a town—where there has been a fort since French and Indian War days.  “Oh, you are so kind.  I love you.  How did you know it was me?  I loved this place when I used to live here.”  The old was suddenly all new to her.  I was new to her, too.  My mother and I always "got along," but ever since I can remember something blocked the free flow of conversation.  Was it her disappointment in me (I was never popular in school)?  Was it my adoration of her (she was a real heroine)?  I have an early memory of standing by the refrigerator door listening to Mom tell me what to tell the babysitter about Katie's bottles.  Katie took her bottle until she was three, so I couldn't have been more than four at the time.  I was trying out words under my breath, practicing what to say to my own mother, and she reprimanded me, "Mary Jo, speak up!"  From then on, something has blocked my words, prevented me from talking to please myself with my mother.  But this recent moment in the parking lot of the Anvil Inn, when she said she loved me and laughed with me, the weight of years, the emotional baggage, the expectations—all fell away.  There were no mother-daughter roles to negotiate.  I lifted her wheelchair.  She saw me as a separate person—a stranger.  For the first time maybe, she noticed me.

Moses Kill River

Earlier that same afternoon, things hadn’t looked good.  Mom was exhausted from the day before when my family and I drove her along the winding roads in the border lands between New York and Vermont, through brown furze with purple mountain-backs humping into the horizon saddled with snow.  The earth there has something animal about it.  But Mom was seeing blueberry fields and talking about this year’s bumper crop.  She asked me if I remembered driving sheep through the valley along the Moses Kill river.  I said I did, going along with her fantasy and, in a flash, understanding why she seemed so tired.  The landscape out the window and the landscapes layered in her brain were like tectonic plates bumping, jarring, thrusting, hurting with the work of metamorphosis.  After several hours she was agitated, especially when Paul pulled in the driveway of the nursing home.  “I want you to take me home.  I do not live here.  If I knew you were going to pull this on me.  Here I thought we were going to have a good time.”  Her face turned red, and crumpled.  She was crying like a child.  I hugged her and told her how sorry I was.  It was awful.  Her body went rigid with resistance as I tried to coax her, gently, to lean forward and put her feet on the ground.  Even the physical therapist, who came out to help with a belt she wrapped around Mom’s waist—“give me a big bear hug,” had trouble moving her.  It was upsetting to leave her sitting in the corridor with other old people all equally disinterested in the 60s re-run of Gomer Pyle that was playing on the television.  I wanted to go home, too. 

Fort Edward Farm in February

She slept and slept through the night and into the next afternoon.  The doctor came in and implied that she was failing.  Paul said, as we sat and watched her labored breathing, “she is so close …”.  I knew that he meant “close to death,” and I snapped at him, “You’ve been saying that for the last year.”  My own heart still insists that she will live forever.  When we stopped at her favorite kitchen store in Vermont, I reluctantly bought a new oven glove in spring green with white goats romping across it.  It is hard to buy things like this because Mom has kept me in kitschy pot holders and dish towels—not to mention socks and rose lotion—my whole life, and I don’t want to admit that those days are gone and that I must do without her provisioning and, worse, do without her someday soon.  Paul took Katya to the mall so I could sit with Mom while she slept.  I picked up her extra-large print edition of “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” and read about Elinore Pruitt’s efforts to make do in the wilds of Wyoming:  “So I turned the current of my imagination and fancied that I was home.”  Eventually, Patty, the occupational therapist, wearing a bright green “Go Irish” sweatshirt, came in, and in a loud voice woke Mom up.  “Welcome back to planet earth, darling.  We are so glad to see you.”  Mom came to and ate half a tuna sandwich and the almond-horn pastry I’d brought from Gambel’s bakery on Route 9.  By the time Paul and Katya got back from the mall, she and I had been talking about her dream of spending nights in grandmother’s bed in New Jersey.  "You won't believe it, but I got into that old house and found my way to grandmother's bed.  I laid down, and an old woman watched me sleep.  'I'd know you anywhere,' she said.  She knew me when I was nursing!"  Mom is always so happy when she describes this fantasy which is very real to her.  I join in and talk about my memories of the houses—the one in which she was born, and the one in which she grew up where the water smelled so sweet and every room was calm and bright.  I wrapped her up in a sky-blue fair-isle sweater and took her out for a relaxing cigarette despite Dr. Garra’s warnings about her bad lungs.  What the heck.  “I always want a cigarette.”  And I always want to get out to stare at the cedar trees that are so much like those in the cemetery in Jersey.  Paul didn’t think it was a good idea to take her out in the car again to go to dinner, but Mom said she was up to it.  Once she had decided, I had no desire to contradict but felt my own heart leap into adventure mode.  Yay!  Mom wants to come out.  She feels like she can do it.  Who knows what will happen …

Friday night and the Anvil Inn was hopping.  It’s a converted blacksmith shop on the bend in the main road through Fort Edward.  The parking lot was full.  Not a problem.  I’d walked in the bar and let the waitress know I was coming in with a wheelchair.  A man leaped up, came out, moved his pick-up truck so we’d have a space that was easy to get Mom out of the car and into the restaurant.  “Mom, I think that was one of the men who helped us last time.”  She and I had tried this restaurant in February and loved the fire in the big stone fireplace and the kindness of all the strangers.  Once again, we got Mom situated easily and the barmaid came around to take our drink order.  “My mother likes dark beer.”  “Guinness,” Mom added.  Well, we don’t have Guinness, but I remember you, and I think you had the Cooper’s Cave Frothy last time.”  “You remember me?” asked Mom.  “Yes, I sure do.”  Mom was tickled by this.  And her own memory kicked in, but it was activated by my questions, reminiscences, and stories.  “What was the longest walk you ever did?  I bet it was when you climbed Giant Mountain?”  “Do you remember driving out with Nala to see Katya when we first brought her home?”  “Remember when Kat and I flew home to see you when Poppy was a puppy?  Remember how he and Nala used to compete for treats?”  “How did you ever manage walking two dogs when we went to Kazakhstan?”  The theme was adventure and long-distance journeys to connect and re-connect.  She began to talk to Katya about school.  She told of her own love of chemistry.  We enjoyed the beer.  The food was great.  It was so good to be there.  To be part of a ring of bright faces and to feel like I had an important role, leading the group, cuing, prompting, remembering, making the conversation work, making the past live again, making us into a family. 

When we were sitting at the table, she knew I was Mary Jo I think.  But on the way out, when I had to squeeze past the wheelchair and lift the front wheels down the step, she smiled at me in a new way.  Then I darted to the car and grabbed the blanket (black and white and very soft).  Oh, I love these blankets.  Yes, you gave it to us for a present.  I did?  Yes.  Oh, you are so kind, and I love you so much.  And I love you.  I pulled my own hat on her head, kissed her cheek and she smiled.  This was so very nice of you.  Oh, I had a wonderful time, too.  Isn’t it a gorgeous night.  Yes, it is: you know, I always loved this part of town when I lived here.  This free exchange of feelings, of appreciation, of love was something utterly new.  We were like spring freshets, flowing and bubbling with life, mixing our words and lifting each other up on happy tones of voice.  I held her hand and kissed her head repeatedly.  When she’d finished her cigarette and we helped her into the car, she said, “that girl who helped with the wheelchair was so kind.”  I started to object, “that was me, Mom, your daughter, Mary Jo.”  But I decided to accept the blessed distance dementia gives us all, to be an ecstatic nobody, riding in the back seat behind my mother and husband, next to my daughter, as the evening light grew richer and the smells of the softening earth wafted through all the cracks in our hard shells.  Who are my intimates?  Who are you?  In one long awaited moment in my mother’s eyes, I became new. 

Via Dolorosa

            A lit tree, piles of wrapped packages, smells of baking, perhaps a fire in the fireplace, a family gathered.  These are all images most of us associate with the Christmas holiday in America 2018.  They are domestic or in-gathered images of purchased and stockpiled happiness.  Christmas in consumer-land, wonderful in its way.  But oh how different from the primary images (poverty, night, cold) and the governing metaphor (a journey) found in both the religious and secular literary texts associated with Christmas.  For instance, when we read T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” right from the start our romantic or pious ideas of the wise men’s journey are shattered.  It is the “dead of winter,” “the worst time of year to make a journey.”  The whole way these magi heard voices “singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.”  When the group of astrologers from the East finally reached their destination, the narrator sounds underwhelmed:  the place was “satisfactory.”  Yet, he claims he would do it again.  There was something compelling, something world-changing about the experience.  What was it?  See what you think.

The Journey Of The Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

It’s curious, isn’t it, that the magus narrator doesn’t mention the star they followed and says nothing concrete about the baby or the birth?  He doesn’t try to describe the nativity scene that many of us set up under our trees.  The consequential event was an internal change, a personal rebirth.  The man is old when he recollects the birth of Jesus.  How far has he travelled in time from the stable?  We don’t know:  it is after the wise men returned to their “places”— “these Kingdoms,” where they felt like aliens.  It might even be after the baby, born in a stall, suffered crucifixion (“three trees on a low sky”).  What’s impressive about the poem is that the Magus is moved, changed forever but doesn’t understand intellectually the meaning of the miracle: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?”  There was a birth “certainly,” but the birth was also his own, and it was inextricably bound up with “death,” understood (I think) metaphorically as death of an old self that is necessary to become something new.  The journey is both death and birth.

Difficult to find a non-iconic representation of the wise men.

            In many Christian denominations, we have four weeks of preparation for Christmas, and this preparation time is called Advent.  It is a time when we are supposed to be preparing our hearts because the Christ, God’s Word made flesh, needs to be born there again and again—not in a stable, not two-thousand years ago.  Our journey to death and birth never ends.  If we take away one thing from the T.S. Eliot poem, I think it’s that the Magus should not have gone back to his old place.  Instead, he should have continued the journey, which seems to be what he longs to do.  “I would do it again,” “I should be glad of another death.”  Because it is only through the mini-deaths of old ways and alien dispensations that we become new or, to use the metaphor, are reborn.  Interestingly, the liturgical readings during this last week of Advent have been full of journeys, in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, is presented as a traveler.  She “set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah” to her cousin Elizabeth’s house, having heard that Elizabeth was “with child.”  She journeys to Bethlehem on a donkey while very pregnant, and, upon arrival, she and Joseph cannot find decent accommodations.  “The journey” is a classical narrative trope, a metaphor for movement out of an old place or state into a new country and way of life.  Most of us have an easy time grasping that metaphor because we feel its relevance in our own experience, and T.S. Eliot writes his poem in the homely way he does to help us connect our own cold comings with those of three iconic holy fools.

            American poet, Robert Frost, claims that poetry educates us in the use of metaphor—saying one thing in terms of another; and he points out that even our regular speech is full of metaphor.  “People say ‘Why don’t you say what you mean /’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets.  We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”  Frost illustrates his point with the metaphor of evolution.  The metaphor is simply that of a growing plant or of the growing thing.  “And somebody very brilliantly,” writes Frost, “said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing.  That is all.”  People need to be “at home in the metaphor,” writes Frost in “Education by Poetry,” because they can teach us to apprehend and live at ease with figurative values.  “At home” with metaphor.  The word “metaphor” combines the Greek words “meta” (between) and “phero” (to carry), and it generally means to transfer between, as in transferring characteristics of one thing to another.  To be at home with such a figure is to dwell provisionally in a home we are constantly extending and expanding through our own imaginative activity.    

            In recent conversations with my elderly mother, who suffers from dementia, I’ve noticed that when I am able to shift the talk out of a literal register and into a metaphorical one, she is more peaceful.  Mom was transferred to a nursing home for rehab after a bout with pneumonia that immobilized her.  She’s regained quite a bit of mobility and wants out, wants to go home.  The trouble is, she can’t go to her actual house at 22 Sylvan Avenue.  Her was a hoarder, and the house is not safe for her.  In addition, the cost for round-the-clock care at home is just too high.  “Mary Jo, I need someone to rescue me.  They are holding me against my will.  Maybe you can call the South Glens Falls Police.”  When I ask her where she wants to go, she says HOME—without any hesitation.  And I have to say, “But 22 Sylvan is no long possible, Mom.”  Then, she says she wants to go to the place she was before, which was an assisted living facility where she had slightly more freedom.  I understand her impulse.  She wants to go back to her place.  Though other people interpret such a request as a sign of dementia, it makes perfect sense to me.  She wants to return to a past time before the hip injury when she could drive and play golf and do Christmas.  She wants to return to her place, and she doesn’t quite grasp that she is on a new kind of journey.  At Thanksgiving, I brought her a book, written by the late Billy Graham when he was 93.  The title of the book is Nearing Home.  I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, Mom could begin to think about home in a less literal way.  Home is any place where she is loved, where she is welcomed, where the lame shall walk and tears shall be wiped away.

            I’ve noticed the way metaphor comforts and challenges my adolescent daughter as well as my elderly mother.  My husband and I adopted Katya, who insists on being called Kat, from Kazakhstan when she was nine months old.  She has been volunteering at the Genesee County Humane Society for the past five months.  I encouraged her to do this, thinking the responsibility would be good for her and pave the way for jobs to come.  But I didn’t anticipate how good it would be for her mental health.  Like so many adolescents these days, Kat suffers from anxiety and depression and jokes that working with the animals is “better than therapy.”  What I didn’t anticipate is the way the work seems to be salving whatever unspoken hurt exists for her about her original loss.  She uses the word, “adoption” frequently—even when another word or phrase would do, and adoption is now a very positive event.  Even when she’s developed a love for a Lilly or Chance or Vader (cat, dog, guinea pig), she is happy when she reports that they “got adopted.”  Getting to be the person who “socializes” and facilitates the transition from “orphanage” to “forever home” for these fur-babies has helped Kat gain a sense of control over her own journey from a baby-house in Uralsk to a family’s home in Flint, Michigan.  She, too, has her own journey to make, and the deep metaphorical resonances of her job at the shelter seem to be helping her negotiate this time when she anticipates leaving home for college.

“How can it be true?  This world grows so old now, how can it be new?”  The answer provided in this Advent church song is, predictably, “Emmanuel” (a name that means God with us).  But in order to experience the new, to feel rebirth at Christmas, we must hasten—and not just toward the mall.  Mary set out in haste to visit her pregnant cousin.  The unnamed Beloved in the biblical Song of Songs (an erotic poem also read during Advent) is compared to a “gazelle,” and he “comes / Springing across the mountains, / leaping across the hills.”  It’s not too late to make the journey the wise men made—and remember, they felt like fools.  Traditionally, Christmas is twelve days.  The magi don’t “arrive” until “little Christmas,” which is also known as the feast of Epiphany, celebrated on January 6^th.  “Epiphany” is a literary term as well which means “realization” or a “feeling of knowledge” or, as Robert Frost would say, “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor.”  There is time to look, to remember, to dwell, to visit, to feel, to have an epiphany.  But to have one, we must get moving: “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, / and come!” 

Advent means To Come

He was there already when I slid into my pew in the second to last row on the left side.  I’d never seen him before.  He was young.  Long dark hair covered by a light blue stocking cap that said “Detroit” in cursive letters across the front.  He wore a dark coat, and he kept trying to pull the sleeves down over his hands as if they were cold.  “I should give him my mittens,” I thought, and that thought kept popping into my head.  It was something I could do.  He did not kneel or stand but sat through the entire Mass with his head resting on his arms that lay stretched out along the pew in front of him.  On the floor was a big bottle of Sprite in a white plastic bag.  Maybe he is sick, I thought—hungover, and I felt for him.  I cast sidelong glances at him during the first few minutes of Mass.  Asian?  Mexican?  No.  He looked more like a Native American, and he either had a scar running down the side of his face or some very high cheekbones.  He looked rough and, from a distance, forbidding.  St. Mary’s Franklin Street is the poorest of the four Flint Catholic parishes.  We don’t dress up for church.  I see the same people in the same rags Sunday after Sunday.  But this man was from somewhere else.  I thought of the recent shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue but then banished the thought.  Other members of the congregation seemed unfazed by the man’s presence.  Noticing their calm, I relaxed and felt happy that he had a warm place to hang out that offered peace after God-only-knows what kind of a night he’d had.  It occurred to me that my quiet presence in his pew was part of what made the church peaceful.  I was part of the “we” who were there for him without questions and without judgment.  Together we were like the great fish that swallowed Jonah and kept him undigested for three days and three nights.  Sure, we wondered who he was and where he’d come from; we are human after all. 

I listened to the priest talk about the reading from Isaiah—making the paths straight and the rough places plain by turning toward God.  Not all at once, but more the way a large jet plane circles around gradually so as not to crash.  “Don’t say you’ll set aside an hour for prayer.  You’ll never do it.  Try three minutes or five.”  While I listened, I was aware of some inward turning toward the man a few yards away.  I couldn’t wait for the sign of peace because then I would have an excuse to look at and maybe touch this mysterious stranger.  When the time came, I watched others gently approach him and saw that he was receptive.  I didn’t need to inch closer and extend my hand since there were many who welcomed him.  He didn’t need my greeting.  But here’s the thing:  I wanted to greet him.  I moved closer slowly, respectfully, ready for a rebuff, and in my motion was a question:  will you touch my hand?  He turned and faced me from an alcohol-scented cloud.  I looked him in the eyes.  His were brown and full of light, his smile genuine, and his damp warm hand clasped mine.  Neither his hand nor his eyes wanted to let go.  I felt that with certainty.  “Peace be with you,” I said.  Then I moved away and began to think about offering him my mittens after Mass.  

As the congregation stood up and moved down the aisles to receive communion, I walked out the other end of the pew so I didn’t have to disturb him.  His head was down again.  Maybe he is asleep.  Maybe he is praying.  Hush.  Hush.  “Peace be with you.”  I walked up the center, bringing up the end of the line, and I remember the blue stone necklace on the little lady with the dyed red hair, who offered me a broken piece of the host, “body of Christ.”  “Amen,” I answered, and took the jagged cracker in my hand.  I walked back to my seat and looked over expectantly, but the man was gone.  Gone!  I was sad.  I was lonely.  I knew in my heart that this man—here and gone—was Jesus.  I was overcome with longing to see him again, to sit near him, to wonder about him, and offer something, anything.  He probably would have refused my mittens, but maybe we could smile and look one another in the eye again, or just sit in the same pew feeling warmth and peace, waiting.  I wanted those eyes that held the light of the world to come back and be with me.  Emmanuel.  God with us.  I caught a glimpse of Him in the anonymous stranger.  I felt love.  The incident reminded me that we are all daughters and sons of God.  Why do we live in denial?  I think that blindness is necessary to live happily a life in which we serve only ourselves.  If we were to see the human face divine in every simple interaction, there would be no point in buying, in scheduling, in checking off items on our list, in surfing the Web.  We would wake up from a dream of separation and live at one with people, letting them be in all their created glory.  Christmas may come early to stores and to the homes of the American consumer, but in the church calendar, there is the season of "Advent."  We light one candle every night for the first week, two candles every night of the second week, three per night on week three, and then four.  This ritual reminds us to take time to Prepare the Way of the Lord!  Whoever the native stranger was, he taught me the meaning of making straight the path.  We do it when we open our hearts.  This is my resolution on the Second Sunday of Advent 2018.

Along Franklin Street there is a reproduction of the Mary, Mother of Flint icon and a place for passersby to kneel and pray.

A Way Through Ruins

When at home in Flint, Michigan, I make my daily round through the ruins of east side neighborhoods, looking into the black eyes of windows, smelling fire smoke from rubble in which a chimney stands like the pistil of a tulip after the petals have dropped off.  I climb porch steps that lead into oblivion.

Franklin Street, Flint. MI.  Franklin Street is the main road through the east side.

My original home—my mother’s home—has gradually gone to wrack and ruin since my father died in 1980.  She filled it with so much stuff that there was no room for life.  “We’re not going to touch the house,” said my brother sternly while my mother lay in a clean hospital bed.  She’d broken her hip after catching her foot in a purse strap hung over a chair in her cluttered kitchen.  My brother’s plan, which I now realize was no joke, is this: “when she dies, we’ll just bulldoze it all into the woods.”  I stayed in the house alone last winter, sat at the table in Mom’s place, grading papers (just like she did).  I was listening hard for life, and I heard the laughing voices from Christmas parties past in myself.  I felt my cold cheeks, swallowed warm cocoa, and felt the warmer presence of my father.  The mice scurried.  I anxiously checked my cell phone all night, fearful of the outside getting in.

All the evocative images of houses are paintings by Charles Burchfield who worked in Buffalo, N.Y.

It’s been a year since Mom broke her hip.  Every other week, something happens and I fear I’ll lose her for good, and I’ve made eight or nine trips home.  Weakened by urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and with “suspicious” areas in her lungs, she keeps living from cigarette to cigarette.  “No I’m not ready yet,” she says stubbornly when I ask if I can squash her butt, “I’m not going to waste two inches of a good cigarette.”

Sitting in my school office at the University of Michigan-Flint, the phone rings, and I am shocked to hear Mom’s scratchy voice.  “Mary Jo (pause).”  “MOM.  (She never calls me).  How ARE you?”  “Terrible,” she responds.  “I need to go home.”  I tell her that I understand.  I tell her we’re working on it.  I remind her that she must be patient, that getting the house ready will take time.  I remind her of Saint Anthony.  She seems calmer, and I feel almost joyful.  She needed me, and I was there.
 

“I’m not the one telling Mom lies,” snaps my lawyer sister in Seattle over email.  I didn’t think I was lying to Mom.  My other sister, who has been managing our mother's care, had asked us the night before to make calls to home health care agencies to see if it was possible to let Mom go home.  The problem has been that the siblings cannot face the ruin, have not mustered the collective will to make the place safe and livable.  At this point, the round-the-clock care Mom needs is too expensive.  I still didn’t feel I was lying to Mom.  I felt I was comforting her.  Home.  What is it?  Where is it?  When I was a young girl traveling alone in Greece, after I’d been raped and dumped back at a hotel with sheets as cold and clean, as stiff and heavy, as those on any hospital bed, I was frantic.  I remember begging the men in the lobby to let me use the phone to call home.  My mother answered.  I tried to tell her that something bad had happened, but I couldn’t say the word “rape.”  Besides, her voice, if I heard compassion in it, could bring me home.  Suffice it to say, I remained stranded.  “Go to the police, Mary Jo.”  When she told the story—and she told it a lot in the intervening years—it became a joke.  “My daughter called from Greece and said a man was following her (ha, ha).  What did she think I could do?”  When my mother called me from a far-away nursing home, I thought she needed my loving voice.  That’s what I gave.

Before driving home to Glens Falls, New York for Thanksgiving, I drop by the religious goods store in Mount Morris, Michigan.  I had the idea that when Mom is feeling particularly agitated if she could look at a statue of Saint Anthony, she would remember to pray.  Her father—my grandfather—who had lost his sanity in our house when he had to move in with us when my grandmother suffered a stroke, always took his bearings by the large framed tapestry of Charles Lindbergh that hung in our family room.  Frank was often agitated and mumbled his worries.  After making his way to the toilet, he’d return through the kitchen and step down—treacherous that one step—into the family room.  Lifting and placing the walker in front of him, he crossed the blue rug like Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic at night, his mind confused by too many years and too much moving around.  “Now where am I?” he’d ask.  But when he made the turn to sit down on his settee and saw the image of Lucky Lindy and his Spirit of Saint Louis, Frank’s question was answered.  “Ah, Lindbergh.”  Somehow the face and all Lindbergh meant would settle him.  I thought that maybe Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, would help Mom in a similar way.

We drove from Michigan across Ontario and New York state and pulled into Home2 Suites by Hilton late on the night before Thanksgiving.  The next morning we went over to Mom’s house.  There had been a snowstorm a week ago, and the driveway and front steps were all crusty with inches of snow and ice.  Dick, her neighbor, who is no spring chicken himself had said he would snowblow this winter.  Maybe the early storm surprised him.  Maybe he went to visit his children in Vermont.  Inside it was warm enough but full of shadows and sadness.  We grabbed two packs of Kools from the carton in the freezer, poked around a bit in the cellar, didn’t see any large rodents (thankfully).  Then, we headed down to meet Mom at the nursing home.

When we got there she was slumped in her wheelchair in the corridor, and I pushed her into her room.  She seemed happy to see us, happy to see Saint Anthony, and the books with Billy Graham (praying) and Pope Francis (smiling).  As for my fantasy of reading Billy Graham’s memoir, written at 93, called Nearing Home, that wasn’t going to happen.  My mother had her own plan.  “So what do you think?  What should we do?”  I told her I’d made a dinner reservation in Lake George, hoping that we could take her out.  “Do you think you are up to getting into the car, Mom?”  She hadn’t done this since September before the pneumonia and before the disorienting transfer to a new facility.  “Oh, of course.”  My sister had told me in an email that the Physical Therapy staff did not recommend taking her out but couldn’t legally stop us.  “Let’s drive to Indian Lake,” suggested Mom.  Indian Lake is where my father’s family lived and where we camped every summer of our lives.  My husband and I looked at each other and smiled.  He whispered later on the drive north, “she’s still pretty adventurous.” 

The day was bright but bitter cold.  Mom’s new wheelchair, extra heavy to accommodate the oxygen tanks they hang from the back, was difficult to take apart and fold up.  “If she is smoking,” explained a weary nurse, “the tank must be turned off.  I’ve seen peoples’ faces burned off.”  We wheeled Mom outside and she stood up with relative ease.  I helped her pivot and turn so that she could lean back onto the passenger seat.  Then I urged her to boost her butt over, knelt down to lift her feet in, and strapped the seat belt across her small body.  Then, Paul lit her cigarette.  She tried to blow the smoke out the crack in the window, and she returned to something like her old self, giving driving instructions and insisting on telling us which roads to take although I’d been driving to Indian Lake all my life.  It was an old road for all of us, and between the mountain scenery, Mom’s reminiscences, her calling “Mary Jo” every five minutes (verbal herding), the car, “hot-boxed” as my sixteen-year-old daughter said, felt like home.  We made stops along the way to get fresh air.  We’d open Mom’s door so she could feel the bright light and cold.  At The Glen, I stood against the car, listening to the Hudson River rush along somewhere behind the houses and railroad tracks.  I looked up and saw the gray tear of a hornet’s nest in a tree against blue sky.  I felt happy that we could make Mom happy.  Thanksgiving afternoon, we felt full long before we dug into a turkey dinner at the Fort William Henry in Lake George.

Night came.  We wheeled Mom out of the restaurant, past a Jamaican woman in a red sweater who kept saying, "God loves you very much."  A full moon lit the parking lot, and, though we couldn't see the surface of the lake, it was easy to imagine a widening circle of brilliant light.  Once we loaded her safely into the car, Mom said to Katya and me, “now we’re going to go home and make a nice fire and get warmed up.”  I knew she thought that we were taking her to her own house.  So when Paul drove the road toward Hudson Falls, she began to protest.  “Paul, you are taking us 20 miles out of the way.  Turn this car around.”  When we stopped at the nursing home, she thought he’d pulled up at a school, and, despite her confusion, allowed us to help her out and take her back to her room.  Sun-downing.  It’s something that happens to old people with dementia.  They get especially confused and agitated at night.  My grandmother could be counted on to say that she needed to be “getting home” every night when dark came.

Something happened overnight in Mom’s head, but the next day—Black Friday, she was more definite and determined and bossy.  I was already tired by the time I arrived at the nursing home from shopping with my daughter at the Lake George outlets, tired of looking at overpriced hoodies and body jewelry.  Mom was playing with her food at lunch, piling carrots in a tower on top of meatloaf, insisting she could get outside for a smoke through the dining room window, and wanting to pay a table-mate’s husband for lunch.  Paul had suggested he go to the Mall with Katya while I stay at the facility and visit with Mom.  But she didn’t want that.  “I’ve been up and down these hallways too many times.  I’ve got to get out of here.”  So we went to the Mall.  All of us.  Then we went for pizza slices at Amore’s restaurant.  And then, Mom said we had to take the pizza home and warm it up.  Her house, her real house, was just a mile away.  “We have heat in there.”  Maybe it was a mistake, but we decided to drive her by the house to see it and to see that the snow and ice would be impossible for her to cross.  “Pull in the driveway behind my car.  Okay.  Let’s get inside.”  We tried to explain to her that we wouldn’t be able to push the wheelchair up the driveway, that the snow was too crusty, that Paul couldn’t carry her across the snow and up the icy steps.  “Oh, that’s just a little bit of snow.  You guys are being ridiculous.  I could sweep that up in a few minutes.  You all just want to take the easy way out.”  We sat for a very long time, staring at the blue Cape Cod.  “Well, there is smoke coming out of the chimney,” I finally said to break the silence.  “Yes.  Because it’s warm in there,” she stated matter-of-factly.  We noticed the little snowman with the dough-boy face, holding the bluebird, that had been on her porch for many years.  I thought of the inside darkness.  I imagined her smoking at the table.  I remembered how I’d sit paralyzed, unable to think or speak or be … just be.  I had always followed her plan.

The ride back to the facility was painful.  Mom got abusive.  “Mary Jo will you just shut up.”  I hadn’t said a word.  “I have a plan.  No one else does, but I do.  You can just drive me back to my house, and I’ll stay in the car for just one night.  In the morning, maybe we can go inside.”  She told me I had a “very mean husband.”  She called Paul “lazy.”  She tried to open the car door while it was moving.  She refused to budge when we got back to the nursing home.  “I am not going in there for $6,000 dollars.”  “Mary Jo, please let me say in the car.”  I tried to tell her that we couldn’t do that.  It was too cold.  It was our car.  We had to pack it and head back to Michigan tomorrow.  Finally, nurses came out and helped us get her in the wheelchair.  “Give me a big bear hug,” said one, as she lifted Mom into the wheelchair.  Inside, a sweet-faced 93-year-old reached out a very warm hand and said, “Oh, you don’t want to go home.  There’s nothing at home anymore.  Here, there are people and things to do.  What can you do at home except wander from room to room?”

I sat with Mom in her new room, and I tried to tell her that I understood her desire.  Home meant normalcy.  Home meant control.  It was hers.  We’ll aim to get the driveway cleared for Christmas and take you back home.  She said, “okay.”  Then her blue eyes brightened and looked right into mine, “Mary Jo, we get along.  You could stay with me.”  It was the eye contact.  After her abusive words, it reminded me that there was a bond—that it was real—when I thought all was lost.  Tears pooled in my eyes.  “Oh, Mom.  There is nothing I’d like more than to get you home and stay with you.”  “Okay, so let’s go.  We can stay in the car.”  I started to explain that we couldn’t do that right now, but instead, I looked long into her eyes, and we both laughed. 

At that moment, I let go of the house.  Home was in her eyes.  When she called me at work, home was in her searching voice.  But she didn’t understand.  And I couldn’t tell her the truth that I didn’t want to sleep in a cold car with her smoking and fussing the way she smoked and fussed for years at the kitchen table while the house became less and less of a home.  Ruin creeps up on us.  It’s a process.  Something gets lost.  Someone goes rigid.  Routine paths through the clutter that are wide enough for just one person become life.  The fire dies.  Little fires get put out.  Meanwhile, skin falls off in patches, and a daughter’s dog licks the sores.  Our house began to sink in 1980.  It was lost to us, her children, back in time, long before Mom was pulled out by paramedics after her fall. 

In Flint, the insides of house after ruined house are char-black.  I think of our old “family room.”  My father and I imagined that room and built it—the railroad ties for beams and the wood stove that sits in its bricked alcove.  We transformed our old back porch and would later build our Indian Lake dream house out of fragile balsam wood and delicate tissue paper on the kitchen table.  An eighth-grade art project worthy of any architectural school.  He taught me that rooms and houses have to be dreamed up and lived in together.  When collaboration ends, life goes out.  I think of Mom sleeping on the couch in that ruined room so she could let the cats out at night, walls blackened by soot and cigarettes and curtains hanging stiff with grime while cobwebs stirred the air.  I begin to understand the anger that leads disappointed families in Flint, betrayed by the stuff they owned and the stuff they couldn’t afford, to torch it all for a bit of pocket change and a high.  

I wish Mom could remember the joy of leaving things behind to go outside—to garden, to golf, to carol in the streets, to slip down a German stream on a riverboat, to visit the frozen and faraway continent of Greenland.  Maybe my brother is right about bulldozing all the stuff into the words.  Ruins are blind.  For some reason I’m thinking of the doomed King Saul.  After a potentially life-altering meeting, woke from madness by the voice of his “son” David, Saul goes back to his place.  But David went on his way.  Two simple words--"place" and "way"-- that are so fraught with meaning.  A place is static; a way is dynamic.  A place is built to defend and ward off; a way is the path of and to God, who makes all things new.   Is that why I compulsively WALK through the RUINS when at home in Flint?