Holding On to the Dead

                My father’s and mother’s deaths couldn’t have been more different.  Pop was 53 and died in his sleep of a massive heart attack.  His children found him the next morning on the pull-out couch in the rental cottage at Indian Lake, deep in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state.  No time to say goodbye.  While I answered the coroner’s questions, his body was taken somewhere, and my brothers and sisters and I never saw him again.  Closed casket.  Mom, on the other hand, was 88 and in a slow decline after a hip break.  Pneumonia after pneumonia had weakened her, and her body gave out.  Even though we had time to let go, time to say goodbye; and even though I was with her when she died and had hours afterward to sit with her expired body and talk to her and talk about her with others, it was still over too soon.  I wanted to keep her.  I wanted to help prepare her, so I pulled off her socks and helped to wash her body.  I wanted to witness all the people that cared about her speaking in loving ways.  I wanted the song the tattooed aide, Jean, played on her cell phone, “What does it Look Like in Heaven,” to go on forever.  But I participated even in the parts of the ritual I didn't want:  I walked behind the gurney, I rode the “cargo” elevator down to the back entrance, and I let them slide Mom’s body, zipped in a bag, into the transport vehicle.  I let them take my prized possession, my world, my mother.  Our close and complicated relationship was over too soon even though she was 88.  

Tending to a long dead relative, the Torjans are comfortable touching and interacting with the expired human body.

                The nursing home staff graciously gave us time to be with our mother.  This was a pleasant surprise because I’d heard Mom complain that the staff at these facilities covered up death.  “They don’t even tell us.”  Because they don’t want to upset people whose own deaths are imminent.  But Lois, my mother’s roommate, was kind.  “Is she still with us?” asked Lois, pulling back the divider curtain on the morning Mom died.  Lois was kind and compassionate throughout Mom’s dying.  She’d been married to a man who ran a funeral home in Argyle and had told me once before that she enjoyed helping people through their grief.  A dozen or so old people in wheelchairs and on foot came into the room to pay their respects to my mother, lying gaunt in her bed with her stuffed newfie on her sunken chest.  Being loved even in death is reassuring to everyone, no matter their age.  Hiding death is terrifying.  Ironically, it was the Catholic priest who rushed us at the grave—“I have to cut this short … I have a very important meeting to attend to discuss how to cope with the shortage of priests.”  I wondered silently how this grieving family would cope with his shortage of compassion.  We stood there beside the casket at a loss.  Someone laid a bough from Mom’s crabapple tree on the wooden box.  Someone else balanced a Kool cigarette on the center molding, carefully so it wouldn’t fall into the hole.  Mom hated to waste a good cigarette or even part of one.  We took turns kneeling and touching the wood as if it was her like the way we kiss the wooden feet of the wooden cross on Good Friday.  She was our Jesus now.  Goodbye priest; we don’t need you.  “O.k.  now we must let the cemetery people do their work,” interrupted Sarah, the waxy-faced director from the funeral home.  We were not allowed to watch them lower my mother into the dark.  We were not allowed to see dirt.  The gravediggers were not even called gravediggers but “cemetery people.”  The social tarp was pulled over the Act 5 ending of our family’s life together.  We left feeling dissatisfied.  We left angry.  None of us were ready for life—the common life we shared through Mom—to be over.

                Moving on after death.  How is it possible?  When Pop died, I felt nothing but anger at the gatherings of well-meaning relatives and neighbors who would tell funny stories, who smiled and laughed.  I wasn’t ready for any of that.  I hated the fact that we were expected to just go on with life, forgetting about his death, ignoring the obvious and utter change.  Years later when I was writing a dissertation on complaint, I read books on elegy and despised the Freudian theory that to complete the work of mourning, the bereaved had to find a compensatory object for the lost loved one.  In the wake of Mom’s death, searching online for connection and comfort, I found an anthropologist talking about a culture in Indonesia—the people are called Torajans—who literally live with their dead relatives for long periods of time.  If grandfather dies, his body is rubbed with leaves or injected with formalin, and he is laid out in the family home and allowed to metamorphose.  His clothes and bedding are changed periodically, and he is taken out for a “walk” around the village.  Family members bring him food, drink, and cigarettes once a day.  When a guest enters and asks about grandfather, his daughter may say, “he is still sleeping,” or “he is sick.”   The anthropologist acknowledged that this may seem gruesome to western people, but that the Torajans had a “relational” perspective on death, understood it as a “social process.”  The years with decaying grandfather in the living room gave the family time to transition, to develop a new relationship to him as a revered ancestor instead of a living family member.  The process of dying wasn’t over until the family could throw a lavish funeral for their family member—a party for the village that involved the sacrifice of many buffaloes, which are the spirit animal that is thought to carry the soul to the afterlife.  The blond anthropologist was evidently taken with this culture because she married a Torajan man, who has happy memories of playing with his dead grandfather.  “If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life,” she suggests, “we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear.”  We have much to learn from peoples like the Torajans.

Corpse of Torajan woman, Tana, going out for a walk

                In the long history of western societies, there have been peoples who have kept the dead with them.  I think of the 7^th century Anglo-Saxon monks, who carried the body of Cuthbert around northern England at the time of the Viking invasions.  Before they placed Cuthbert in his final resting place, the monks opened the box and found that his body was “incorrupt.”  That means that it hadn’t decayed, was fresh and flexible, as if he were just sleeping.  This was one of the many miracles that established the cult of Saint Cuthbert.  Research suggests that holy men and women were frequently exhumed by the faithful, who still searched for confirming signs that there was a spiritual life beyond death.  The dead were seen as persons, medieval historian, Peter Brown, explains.  "Indeed the cult of the saints in sixth-century Europe is an illustration of the ancient and poignant theme--the quest for the Ideal Companion.  The saints, said Ambrose (made bishop of Milan in 374), were the only relatives that you were free to choose. Their protection had the intimacy of a surrogate kinsman.

                It seems to me that in our world, because of the dominance of scientific positivism, we need practices that recognize, mark, and honor major losses, and we need desperately new understandings of death, informed by the lifeways of peoples in other places and other times.  My own mother used to tell and re-tell the story of Grampy being laid out at home.  I never asked her how many days he lay in her Aunt Ruth’s parlor, but she said she talked to him and bumped into him when she had to run the vacuum.  

                My neighbor Lark, who works at an elder-care facility, lost her mother in 1994.  “It’s still hard,” she admits, but at least once a year, Lark says that she has a weirdly comforting dream.  “Me and my sisters go and dig Mom up and we take her out for a car ride.”  Whenever I have this dream, I am just so excited to really see her.  I guess it’s kind of weird that we have to dig her up, but it’s still wonderful to see her and talk to her.”  I’ve been praying, really praying, to have such a reassuring dream.  I want to see and feel my mother’s presence.  I want her in any form.  I want her death to be part of my life.

                “It isn’t over.  Death doesn’t mean the relationship is over.  Of course, death makes the person no longer accessible in the same way, but you hold on to them by remembering.  That is how you grieve.”  My current therapist thinks that the panic I feel at losing my mother stems from the fact that my father’s death was so sudden.  He did disappear.  I’m not satisfied with the cliché that “you have your memories.”  We lose memories, all too easily as well.  No … I want to hold my mother’s hand.  I want to light her cigarette.  I want to see her toothless smile.  I realize that none of us can know, but rather than rely on psychological or even religious truisms, I’d rather trust my feelings.  And I feel that my mother and I are on some kind of journey together.  I know this because every night since she died I sleep a restless sleep searching for her.  I don’t have vivid or colorful dreams; what happens as night feels more like “dream thoughts.” The first week after her death, my dreaming mind was full of my effort to get to where she is … to help her somehow.  Now, the third week, I sleep more deeply and have dreams with situations in which we talk things over:  the tiresome nursing home people, whether her boyfriend can live with us, whether she likes clown-suited nurses.  Weird things like that.  But at least we are talking.  My friend, Lark, tells me to end the day with a cup of tea and a talk with Mom.  I am trying to do that, too.  When I see something on my daily walks that reminds me of her, I try to remember to talk to her about them.  If I am more assertive, if I complete my sentences, if I am courageous, then maybe I can even improve my relationship with Mom.

                I still think of her eyes when they looked at me for the last time.  Close to death, they were still so blue.  The blue of longed for things that are always far away:  mountains, the ocean, a city on the horizon line.  The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.  Essayist Rebecca Solnit explains that blue is the color of light that got lost.  “Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us.  It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. … This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”  My blue-eyed Mom was always a little bit distant.  Not a hugger.  Emotionally cool.  Leaving her babies asleep at the foot of the mountain to ride to the top and ski down.  When she opened those eyes and looked at me in her last moments of life, she tinged with blue my solitude, grief, and longing, setting me on the road that leads (perhaps) to the conclusion that some things we have only as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. 

Offerings of cigarettes to the dead continue in Indonesia

Pastures New?

St. Anthony, St. Anthony

Please come down

Something is lost

And can’t be found.

Saint Anthony is my mother’s go-to saint.  Right now I need his help because for the past three weeks of nights, I cannot sleep but look for her obsessively.  For my husband, the dead are dead: just gone.  For religious friends, the dead go to heaven; “they are in a better place,” end of story.  The story of my life with mother and maybe every daughter’s life with her mother cannot have such a clear ending or maybe any ending.  After I read a book on “fell” shepherding in the Lake District of England, I understood better.  A fell (from Old Norse fell, fjall, "mountain") is a high and barren landscape feature, such as a mountain range or moor-covered hills.  In fell farming, the sheep spend most of the year on upland pastures that are not fenced or walled.  In theory they could wander right across the Lake District.  But they don’t because they know their place on the mountains.  They are “hefted,” taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs.  “Heft” can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adjective, and it basically describes an attachment or bond to an animal’s special spot on earth. 

As long as Mom was here, on this earth, my place was somehow secure … even when she was at the nursing home.  Now that she is gone, gone too is that invisible cable that bound me to her and to my place.  At night, I follow an irresistible urge to head home … to her, to her in a box, to do something, to get somewhere, to suckle.  No places are recognizable anymore.  Where is my place on the mountain?

The morning I sat with her before she headed off to her own place, I kept my hand on top of hers.  Her hand was like a rocky mountain, and it was warm in the way stones absorb the heat of the sun.  I remember thinking of her body, even in its shrunken state, in terms of a landscape or a world.  My mother.  My mountain.  She was it for me.  And like a good fell ewe, she taught me the places where I belong, to which I will be returning all my life:  Nesco on the edge of the Jersey Pines, Brigantine—the sea isle off Atlantic City, and Indian Lake.  But even more than these beloved places, she taught me how to find good pasture anywhere.  She led the way.  Even in hard times.  I talk to her as I walk.

“Mom, I was coming up through Kearsley Park yesterday, and the purple phlox was blooming like mad.  Suddenly, I remembered that God gets pissed off if people don’t pause to acknowledge the color purple.  So I did, and I noticed a path along the stream.  I followed it into the bushes, and I saw evidence that homeless men had used it as a washing place.  Some of their clothes remained on the branches.  Along this part of the stream, I’ve seen woodchucks and even deer—so near the road.  When I took the path to the washing place and thought of these men without houses, I thought of you going to the laundromat all those years and enjoying the adventure of it.  For most people, laundry is a chore we take care of in the privacy of our own houses.  But you filled the cellar so full you couldn’t have a repairman down to fix or replace the machines when they broke.  No worries.  You didn’t complain; just did what you had to do.  Even from this distance, I can still hear you striking up conversations at the Broad Street laundry.  I see you rubbing stain remover into the collars of your white blouses and standing outside in your jeans puffing on a Kool cigarette.  No cell phone to scroll through.  No book to read.  You looked.  You sensed the air of the day.  For you, this was pastime passing excellent, and you drove home with a sense of accomplishment.  Work is something that you relished.  It was life.  It was fun.  You showed us how to graze.  ‘Graze, my daughters on the fields of this world.  Don’t shy away.’”

There will be no other mother for me.

 

Why didn’t I stay by your side like Jennifer did?

I wanted you to come to Michigan, but you didn’t want to leave your own home turf and Jennifer packed up her life and headed north, going to the place where she’d been hefted.

What about me?  Banished.  Far away from my familiar mountains and fields.

Can we find each other and find a new place to graze together, Mama?  Will you lead me there tonight?

Dear Saint Anthony, I pray

Bring her back without delay.

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.  

   

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.