Reality

   My mother has the sweetest face in all the world.
   Her gray eyes crinkle, and she smiles with her whole self.
   She's truly glad to see me, whoever I am, and she loves me whoever I am and is grateful that I have come to sit with her.
   She says, "We are little now."

   She sings along to several songs, including "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window," "Silent Night" and — as of today — "I'm Getting Married in the Morning."

   She's as pretty and fresh-faced as any child.
   She says, "I'm 90...something."
   I say, "You're almost 92. In a few weeks you'll be 92."
   She says, "I am?!"
   I hold up my fingers like bunny ears and make them hop. "When people ask how old you are, you can make bunny ears like this and say, 'I am 92!'"
   She laughs.
   She giggles. She crinkles her pretty eyes and wiggles her nose.

   My mother has the sweetest face in all the world.

Spurweed and burr clover

   Bank this word, it could come in handy some day: desolation.

   When it is raining in the city like it's raining in your heart, and you can't pull your wit up high around your neck for protection — which will happen, one of these days, if you love anyone — you will be very lucky if a true friend is nearby, private, and you can hurry into his arms and let him hold you up while you quit trying to stand. Empty your sinuses on his shoulder and give up any pretense that you know how to be an adult, lucky girl.

    Lucky, so lucky to have a friendly husband like that. And if you can see your good fortune and still you cannot cheer up, then you are wandering in the wasteland that is desolation.

   Gradually, over a period of about two weeks beginning around the time of my last post here, I had slipped deeper and deeper into bleak, almost wordless unhappiness. Things are getting grim when I run out of words.
   I was oppressed by the thought that I had appointed myself Mourner in Chief, for attention. That other people were missing Mom just as much and that only they and no one else cared. What is one more dying old lady when 3,770 migrants were reported to have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2015? That I was exaggerating my sorrow and that the sympathy friends were offering was unearned.
   That these were First World problems.
   That my feelings were illegitimate.
   That I had life pretty darn good.
   Why wasn't I more curious about other people?
   And then came my meltdown at work, for which I hope I remember forever that I love Michael.

    I didn't even know the name of the experience until I read it in a blog. The day after the day after Mother's Day, as I fought to compose myself by flipping through my Facebook newsfeed, the algorithm served up a link to a blog post where the writer was doing a series about St. Ignatius and his rules for dealing with times of desolation.

    No sooner had I read the word d-e-s-o-l-a-t-i-o-n and thought, "ah," than the sun peeked out from behind dark clouds — no kidding, it happened above the skylights in our office.

    Looking back, I realize what went "wrong," leading to my undoing, was something very right: Joe, my brother, paid us a visit from Colorado. Seeing this quiet, kind gentleman react to Mom's diminishment forced me to notice certain accommodations I'd erected, how I had been protecting myself behind a jaunty wall of remarks and reports and busy-ness. Not to draw too large an arrow to it, but somebody has needed to carry a lot of weight in the past two years, and my mother appointed me.

    But after Joe's calm sorrow and his honesty, realizing how tough it is for my siblings who are not here and don't have a daily routine to help them build defenses, I felt ashamed. I stopped making slick exits from the nursing home and instead tried to observe and be more present. That is intense. Sweet, sad, crushing, ennobling, funny ... intense.
   Pile on a few losses in other areas of life — discovering spurweed and burr clover had taken over the yard, for example — and in short order, I was a wreck.

    Of course I made a point of following that blog for several days, to read what else Tom Elliott had to say about good St. Ignatius and his surprisingly helpful vocabulary. It helped to be reminded that feelings fluctuate:
   "No one lives entirely in consolation and no one needs to live entirely in spiritual desolation. Oscillation between these two realities is simply a natural part of healthy spiritual growth. Consolation will eventually give way to desolation, which will, in turn, give way to consolation again."

   And there was this: "that desolation can be an opportunity to grow in patience."

   He boldfaced the word patience.

Loose threads

   I missed a fun trip, a colleague is leaving for a different job and stupid bastards trashed 100-year-old memorials at Mount Holly. Normally I would trip over news like that, but this week it threw me down a flight of stairs. I woke up in a heap at the bottom rung to a day of crying jags. Everything became so much "about me," that finally I left work early so I wouldn't make a scene.
   Thursday being my day to visit Mom, I headed north to get that over with. She was brilliantly cheerful, greeted me like a long-lost friend, admired my teeth, wanted to go to my house and had no idea who I was.
    I stopped in the restroom on the way out, looked at my face in the mirror and walked out with the words "careworn" and "threadbare" competing in my mind.
   Bear with me. This is one of those deals Michael calls my "intellectual exercises" — tedious for others but useful to me. Here is what I have been thinking:
   Part of me that's normally well padded has become threadbare from being careworn. A person might be careworn and not be threadbare, but I'm threadbare.
   To be careworn is to have been worn down, rubbed or degraded by care. But, also, I see Care come along, pick up the person, peel open a seam in his skin and wriggle in as though he were a pair of skinny leg jeans.
   When someone you love is ill or broken, Care could put on your skin and wear you out into the world, and wear you out.
   A careworn face could be lovely because caring brings on love, and vice versa. But also, to be careworn may be to look puffy from a lack of sleep or an excess of weeping. A careworn face might be haggard, especially after a long night in one of the pride-suffocating places love drags us all sooner or later — the ER, church, graveyards, airports.
   I could also riff a bit on fraying from being afraid, but I don't feel afraid.
   But threadbare? Does that mean the garment has lost threads and so it is bare, or is it baring, showing, its threads?
   When Care pulls you on and struts about in your threadbare skin, how does that make the people who love you feel? They have to look at you looking like that, with the raw Care visible through the woof and warp of your threads. They have to see and not know how to make it all better.
   Your care becomes their caring becomes their care, and soon enough both of you are threadbare.
   Love can be worn. I don't want it to wear out.

Birdcage

   Monday afternoon my back was still hurting from sitting on an overinflated ball (long story) so I arrived at the nursing home a bit early for my usual visit and found Mom parked in her geri chair in the hallway, unaware she was waiting her turn for a shower.
   Her hospice aide was passing through, saw me headed to her and turned back from wherever she was headed to assure me that Mom was "next up" but we had "plenty of time: Don't rush."
   My glimpse of this aide, whom I hadn't met before because normally she bathes Mom in the morning, left an impression of capacity, approaching middle age, strong softness. A welcoming, reassuring, red-headed woman.
   But crouching beside Mom's geri chair in the hall is never comfortable, and this day, there was no way my back could let me; fortunately the home has several seating areas we could wheel into, including "the birds" — a cul-de-sac with chairs arrayed before a large acrylic finch aviary.
   I think that this bird terrarium (it's a wooden cabinet with clear windows and narrow doors that can admit a human body) represents the tip of a subcultural iceberg: Somebody at the home must be a fincher, infatuated with zebra finches. I think this because, while trying to find the proper term for the home's bird box-cage, I Googled around and almost at once fell down a rabbit hole of zebra finchery.
   Unobserved among us ordinary folk, aficionados of the zebra finch go pleasantly about their obsessions, documenting themselves for one another on sites like Finchworld, eFinch, Finch Niche. They are dimly noticeable to Muggles only when they own a certain sort of semi-public but protected space and set up an aviary in it — like the one in Mom's nursing home. I found a website where people had posted plans for several aviaries just like her home's, along with photos of people erecting them.
   Also, at Savers, I found a 25-cent book about raising zebra finches.
   So there you go: Proof.
   The population in the nursing home's aviary-box-cage thing waxed during the winter, rising to what looked like 11 of the orange-cheeky pipers. But on Monday, only two finches were visible, and they had tucked themselves into a straw nest behind a silk flower.
   Also, the box held a pair of mourning doves, one of whom regarded us disdainfully, rotating an orange eye socket.
   Mom and I perched there talking about what good teeth I have and whether or not I have a car and we could go to my house, when a 5-foot-9-inch janitor-looking fellow arrived and thumped a package of cedar chips atop the box. The impact created a literal flurry of alarm inside. Birds peeped and fluttered before settling, uneasily, on the dowel-rod swing. On a chair behind us, he set a bottle of window cleaner, a shop rag and some sprays of purple silk flowers.
   I moved Mom back from what I had incorrectly supposed were the sturdy glass walls of the box to get out of his way. And then we watched as he went rapidly about spraying down those wobbly acrylic windows and wiping them clear.
   I asked how often he does the bird maintenance, and he said something confusing: "This month I'm doing all this month on the second Monday every other week."
   Eventually he unclasped the door and ducked awkwardly inside the box. He had to turn and stoop to step sideways though the narrow door. Suddenly there were four zebra finches and the two doves frantically beating around his head. Imagine King Kong and the airplanes.
   This was different enough that Mom actually noticed.
   "He can't let them out," she said. "Let's go to your house."
   I know how tall he was because I asked him after he emerged.
   Also, he said, yes, it smells in there, but not too much.

Individuals

   One time when Mom was still teaching special ed and I was back at home during a college break, I sat down next to her at the dining table while she was doing paperwork. It was her least favorite part of teaching — IEP time. Notebooks were piled around her. She was filling out an IEP for a child whose only documentable skill was sticking out his tongue. 

   An Individualized Education Program was a formal requirement for which only certain phrasing was acceptable. It was a proof in writing that the teacher had plans for the child that considered his needs and his potential. It required her to articulate her goals for him. 

   I was on a self-improvement kick, determined to become the sort of girl who takes an interest in others, and so I asked, "Mom, why are you bothering to keep up this charade that you can teach a child like that anything? What goal can you possibly set for a student whose skill is sticking out his tongue?" 

   She said, without looking up and while writing, “Retracting his tongue.”

Persuasion

Today I met a (new to me) nursing home character, "MeMaw." She's a broad shouldered, white-haired woman. I was sitting beside Mom's bed, alternately showing her my knitting and gossiping with her roommate "Sunny," when MeMaw pulled herself into the doorway.
   She teetered sideways a bit, and fingered the wall for balance.
   Sunny fussed at her to go get her walker from the Bistro dining area. "You know you need your walker, MeMaw," she said. "Where is your walker?"
   People do what Sunny tells them to do. MeMaw tottered out of sight but soon came lumping back with a walker. Based on how quickly she obeyed, I expected she wouldn't be able to say much — the nursing home has many vague, wandering residents — but MeMaw parked herself at the foot of Mom's bed and proceeded to cajole and coax her to smile.

   "She always smiles for me," MeMaw informed us.

   Sunny wasn't annoyed by her presence in the room, so I decided that it could be useful to encourage this lady to want to come in more often, talk at Mom more frequently.
   So I got Mom to show off how well she wiggles her nose.

   Mom's proud of her nose wiggling, which is an adorable sight, it truly is, and she has always known that it is. She used to know that it makes people like her, and I think she still does know it. She can wiggle it with her mouth open, so it looks like only the tip of the nose moves.
   Right away, MeMaw began urging Mom to wiggle her nose again, and Mom of course wiggled her nose.
   The three of us were very proud of our manipulations.
   I glimpsed Sunny's expression out of the corner of my eye. She was looking at us like we were idiots.

   Sunny is my age. What must it be like to live in a nursing home when you are 30 years younger than the rest of the residents?
   Today she told me about someone who had been taken away to a hospital, but then came back, and about a person who had pneumonia and had been dragged out of bed for dinner by an aide who didn't know she was sick. Also, someone has a UTI, which is bad. "He's sinking," Sunny said.
   I replied that it was interesting how people decline, and she said, "I sit by myself at dinner now that Gladys can't feed herself anymore."
   "Jean," Sunny's closest friend, lives across the hall, wheelchair bound but still in possession of her mind. Jean's roommate has dementia, and the other day she tried to get into her wheelchair alone and fell on her face. She looks like someone took a bat to her. But she's no more dazed than normal and can scoot her wheelchair up and down the hall.
   Sunny and Jean commiserate about their demented roommates. Jean's roommate wakes up in the night and wants to go to the store. They agree that my mom is a much better roommate because she's immobile. She just lies in bed staring at the ceiling. If she does talk to herself in the night, Sunny can turn up the white noise machine I gave her, say, "Julia, listen to the rain," and Mom obediently closes her eyes and pretends to sleep.

Contaminated

   Staring at old photos of Mom's childhood has heightened my awareness of how much time has passed already, how quickly it is always passing, to the point that at our nephew's christening party potluck on Easter, my mind framed up future old family photos when I looked at other people's kids.

Cousin Junie (?), Aunt Kip (?), Mom (?)

Snap!
   Here's little Katie wearing something on her head: Someday, she will be an old woman.
   Here's little older brother Kevin teetering sideways on one heel while antique ladies inexplicably give him a hard time over asking for an apple: Someday, he will look at this old photo and not recognize himself.

   I am not fit to observe reality any more. There is too much determination in me to make sense of mom's dementia. I am looking for explanations where no explanations are.

 ...

   Mom greeted me yesterday with a brave question: "Are we getting married?"
   One of the nursing home aides is getting married in June, and Mom has become a bit obsessed with her. I didn't know whether she meant "we" as in she and I or we as in me. It might have been either. She's fluid.
   But I went with me as in I and answered, "I'm already married, to Michael Storey."

   She was agog. "You are?!" But then Mom thanked me.
"I learned something I did not know," she said. "So you're married to Michael."

   We had a lovely conversation for more than an hour during which she repeatedly learned that I am married to Michael and was repeatedly grateful to have learned something she had not already known. Michael called my cellphone, and she listened and grinned while he and I were witty back and forth on speaker, as we do, to the exhaustion of everyone around us. And she even read his name aloud off the phone, many times: "Michael Storey." But I am sure she did not gather that the voice joking through the phone was the Michael I had told her I am married to or that I am her daughter.

   She had no idea who I was — and she knew how to behave. She behaved very well. I was talking to a smart little girl.

   If her child self is still contained within her and so well preserved that it reappears now, is child me still inside me someplace? Underneath all the oldness and the duty and the getting by, is young brat me still in here?
  I have put a great deal of effort into outgrowing young brat me. I wonder if Mom put that much effort into outgrowing Little Julie the smart student?

   I know she put a great deal of effort into it, because one of its consequences, pride of intellect, blew up her first marriage — or so she told me a few years ago. But being always a student was a virtue in her, it made her an outward-looking person, resilient during hard times, resourceful, a good problem solver and a most tactful teacher.
   If Mom really has forgotten not wanting to be Smart Little Julie and if that's who she is now, then Smart Little Julie wasn't such a bad little girl. Because today she is sweet. She is polite and sweet.