Too young to be Pilgrims

Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton (1833-1905)

   You know how sometimes the battery isn't dead but it's really weak, and so the car won't start the first four times you crank it, but after you've sat there trying out various combinations of dirty words for, oh, five minutes, you try one last time and it turns over? Something like that happened with Mom today.

   She was napping when I arrived but not deeply, so I woke her by showing her the unrealistically blue orchids they had for her at Kroger.
   We spent about 30 minutes cycling through today's statements: "That's the most beautiful blue." "It would never happen, ever." "I'm 90 ... something." And "What's Michael doing?" "Oh God, here come some more Pilgrims."
   The Pilgrims are in a print on her wall. A group of them are walking to church in the snow, and they stare out at the viewer with expressions that make me wonder if possibly I am a bear.
   I gathered that what would never happen ever was the blue of the orchid. And Michael is always mowing the lawn or "thinking of things for us to do."


   I put on the Sound of Music  CD and danced around to "16 Going on 17," always good for yuks. That girl shouldn't listen to the boy, he wants to be a Nazi. But this time, when I "conducted" the band using hand shadows, Mom merrily joined in with the only hand she had available. When the song ended she looked disturbed.
   "We got stuck here somehow," she said.

   Maybe she meant her head was stuck in her neck pillow or we had listened to Sound of Music one too many times or that she was stuck in a bed in a nursing home. But on a hunch I looked under the blanket, found her left hand and pulled it out so she could see it.
    She held her two hands up and studied them a while. "This is all that's left of me."
    I said, "Yep. You're nothing but hands now."
    And she got the giggles.

   Eventually Michael called on the phone and was his usual funny self, and she listened with a lot of interest. Sunny wheeled in and soon was having a crisis in the bathroom, so aides came in. And in the middle of all this stimulation, Michael started making jokes about the Pilgrims, asking Mom if she'd known any Pilgrims, and I said, "Mom was born during Prohibition."
   Michael asked her, "What did you drink?" and Mom answered him.
   She said, "Water. Nothing but water."
   This was different.
   Remembering that she used to talk about watching her uncle make soap in the basement — which somehow I've gathered was code for making wine or something harder — I said, "And soap?" She studied me, as though to decode whatever it was I had said. I repeated, "Uncle Eddie was making soap in the basement, wink, wink."
   "No," she said. "No, it was soap."
   Hootch was not made in the basement at Uncle Eddie's house?
   "Auntie Minnie would never have done that," she said.
   "But what about Uncle Eddie? Would he? Wasn't he tricksey?"
    She said, "It was soap and they used it to scrub everything in the house."
    This was turning into a genuine conversation.
   "But Auntie Minnie made cookies, right?" I asked. "Because she didn't like that the men were drinking on empty stomaches, and she knew they would eat cookies. They wouldn't eat dinner, but they would eat cookies."
   And she said, "That's right."
   "Huh. Well, I have misunderstood something all this time. So it was soap in the basement. Were they good cookies?"
   "They were delicious," she said.


   I don't mean to suggest it was a fluent conversation, but it still seemed special even after we'd repeated the discussion about basement soap several times. But finally I needed a change, so I responded to the house scrubbing bit by asking if Aunt Mary and Uncle Eddie had made her and the other kids clean the house with them.
    She said, "No, they never made us do that."

Aunt Mary and Uncle Eddie's house

    "You made us do chores,"  I pointed out. "Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, doing the laundry.  You made us do it but also you taught us how to clean things, so I suppose that was good. Thank you for that. But they didn't make you do chores?"
    "No," Mom said. "But they cleaned everything with the soap, they scrubbed the whole house from top to bottom. And all we drank was water. Just water."
    "And tea," I said. "I know for a fact you drank tea, too, because your mother sometimes would look at the tea leaves."
    Mom was momentarily confused. Then she smiled to herself. It looked for all the world as though she was remembering.

   I asked her if she'd known any of the Pilgrims personally and she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. "That was too long ago." On the phone, Michael was calculating centuries for us.
   Meanwhile, we looked at the Pilgrims on the wall. "What do they want? Why don't they get out of the cold snow?"
   Michael joked that their pants didn't go all the way to the ground, and Mom laughed so hard I think she wet herself, because she looked very distressed.
   "They came here and stomped around in the snow and made us have to cook a turkey every year," I said.
   Stupid Pilgrims.
   She laughed some more.

   "That must have been a dirty little house," I joked, and she laughed. But then she said, wistfully, "It was a nice little house."
    She suddenly looked sad, so I agreed, "It was a happy little house."
    And she said, so very sad now, "That's all over. ... I don't know how I got to be so old."
   "I'm old too," I said.
   "How old are you?"
   "I don't know," I said, "Not as old as you are, though."
   "I'm 92," she said. "But I guess I will live to be 100 years old."

Happy day

Sweet grandbaby visits Mom two weeks ago.

   If the person you've come to the nursing home to see is asleep when you get there, he will wake up for you or he will not. The outcome's easy to predict: There's asleep, and then there's asleep with the mouth open.
   The mouth-open sleeper is a deep diver, unreachable.
   After missing more than a week of visiting Mom because of traveling to Indiana and then coming home with the grandbaby's chest cold, finally today I felt well enough that if I didn't go see her, guilt would wreck my night.
   It's about a 30-minute drive on a Sunday morning, or maybe 25 minutes. And so the car's air conditioner was doing an excellent job by the time I parked, shut down the engine and popped open the door to the reality of hot air. Gathering an armload of good-bet children's books and a laptop loaded with new baby pictures, I made myself smile and walked into the building, past the nurses and down the long hallway to her room.
   Where Mom's mouth was open.
   Some days, that is my best case scenario, but after such a vacation, it was deflating. Was I really going to drive all that way only to turn right around and head back? I cast around the room for chores to make the trip worthwhile.
   I stroked her hair. Nothing.
   Maybe I should sit and sing at her. But no, I was still wheezy.
   The potted plants needed water, and so I switched them from one side of the TV to the other. I plucked a bit of paper off the floor. Wrote a note to Mom's roommate Sunny and left it by her bed.
   I stroked Mom's hair again.
   Noticing that her teeth were stained with a brown line, possibly leftover from chocolate pudding, and that they looked uncomfortably dry, I decided to risk moistening her lips. There were three plastic-wrapped sponges on sticks atop the TV cabinet. I opened one, got a glass of water to dunk it, and wiped her teeth.
   Without opening her eyes, she peeled back her lips. Uppers first, then lowers. She went on snoring gently, and yet she moved her lips out of the way so I could clean them.
   I squeezed a sip of water into her mouth.
   She spoke! She said, "Happy day."
   Nothing more, and her eyes stayed closed. Just "Happy day." She was under deep again, mouth gaping.
   The exchange took maybe a minute and a half, but I felt as justified and acceptable as though I'd sat with her for an hour and a half. I stole from the room and drove home to spend the rest of the day making pottery.
   And I'm pretty sure I won't be waking up to worry about my selfishness and failures tonight, either.

Don't worry about that

   Our daughter and grandbaby are visiting, and they have head colds. Caroline was concerned that, given Mom's frailty, a cold might kill her. Would it be safe to take the baby to the home for a visit?
   Maybe. I mean, anything is possible.
   But more likely the baby would pick up something from Mom.
   No head cold is likely to kill or even disturb my 92-year-old mother.
   In the past two years, she has survived the flu that killed other residents, several UTIs and (by my count) three bouts of pneumonia, the most recent brought on by sinus drainage from her seasonal allergies.
   Ordinarily, people with seasonal allergies are miserable, but they change postures, walk around, blow their noses, cough and keep their lungs clear. Mom lies in bed too weak to hold up her head longer than a few seconds. Her lungs were wet all spring, and eventually she developed some pneumonia.
   I thought, "Pneumonia is an old man's friend."
   I thought, "She'll simply go to sleep and not wake up."
   I thought, "What a relief it will be."
   I thought, "But will it?"
   I thought, "No, Mommy, don't die!"
   Now she's fine.
   I think that her immune system has already become well acquainted with each and every one of the rhinoviruses of central Arkansas and so would simply blink at this head cold the baby has picked up from her Little Rock cousins.
   Blink.
   Poof.
   Bye-bye.

Other people's bananas

   Lately all I want to do is sit on the deck and read the Kindle he gave me for Christmas and so Michael wants to know if I am alright. And why am I in a bad mood?
   And I forgive him, because it must be wearing to live with the Angel of Death for 624 days.

That is equal to one year, eight months, 16 days. Or 445 weekdays and 179 weekend days. Or 89 weeks and one day. Or 14,976 hours. Or 898,560 minutes. 

   Or 53,913,600 seconds.

   You try living with someone like me for something like that amount of time, see how compassionate you wind up being.

   
   Before Michael gave me the Kindle, I'd fallen out of the habit of reading for pleasure. Everything was nonfiction, everything was work. Self-improve. Measure up. Use that time.
   But since Mom collapsed and started to die on Sept. 27, 2014 — has it really been so long? Yes. I tried to explain to people back then that she was dying, that this was a hideous, horrifying, maddening emergency, but they didn't seem to take me seriously and instead went on with their little errands, caring about work and relying on me to care about work as usual, and then her dying went on and on and on and ON, until last week she passed her second birthday in the nursing home — well, after her collapse, I couldn't read anything but the virtuous or the required.
   But now I have this Kindle and I read whatever: Elizabeth Warren, Tolstoy, Neil Gaiman, that Foundations book, that book about How Not to Die and Lev Grossman, Pretty Good Poems, Emily St. John Mandel ... whatever. Someone mentions a title, I download it and start reading.

   I'm working my way through Louise Penny's Armand Gamache mysteries, which are set in Quebec. They are humane, mildly appalling and as soon as I finish one, another presents itself to my Kindle.
   I sit on our screened porch, out of the artificial chill of the never-ending AC, and with the neighborhood birds as background noise, I try to see Armand's kind brown eyes and try not to see who killed whom and why before he does.
   A few books ago, Gamache learned something about Buddhism and, I don't know, psychology maybe, that seemed to apply directly to this long ordeal with my mom. I haven't blogged anything here while I've been turning his insight over and over in my mind.
   Can you guess what it was? 
   Go ahead and guess.
   I'll wait.
   Ha, ha. My little joke. Because I know the actual universe is not all about me, I know there is no earthly way anyone who isn't me could guess what I'm thinking until I say.
   It was the concept of the "near enemy." 
   Very different attitudes that result in the same behavior but to totally different ends. For instance, how compassion differs from pity, pity locking us in our self-centered sense of superiority, compassion allowing us to see the world through someone else's eyes. 

   Love vs. attachment. Respect vs. indifference. Joy vs. frivolity.

   At first, after I read about this subtle stuff, I fretted over the problem of assuming one is compassionate when really one despises the needy person. I was interrogating myself: You seem to be doing good deeds but are you really a selfish jerk? But then it occurred to me that so long as I go on doing the work that needs to be done, why is irrelevant. If motives don't get in the way of being useful, they do not matter.

   But now I'm stuck on Joy vs. Frivolity.

   When I'm in the moment that is being with my mom, we share joy. Because she is a joyous spirit, but also because we are friends of long standing. We have been friends for 60 years. Think about that. She has older daughters, but they are far away, and all her close friends are dead. My younger sister Beth and I are her oldest living friends. 
   Also, she is mine.
   And there is no one else in my life so reliably delighted by my frivolous insolence.

Mom and Zoe Lynch doing ... something ... near lady finger banana trees

   Like today she was hungry because she vomited last night because her congestion makes her cough, and she didn't eat much earlier because, hey, dying. And so by evening today she was hungry. When she's hungry, she talks about bananas. 
   If they will just give her a banana, she is content and so pleased she will tell people about that banana for hours: "I just ate a banana!"
   So this evening she was parked at the feeding table, slipped hopelessly sideways as she does because she cannot remember things like sitting up, and I sit down and put my yellow umbrella on the table. It has a duck head for a handle. She looks at that umbrella and she says, "We already have the umbrella."
   And I think, "Huh?" But I say, "Okay."
   Then she says, "Yellow." 
   And she's pleased with herself and I know why.
   Yellow, note, is also the color of bananas. She asks me, "Did we remember to plant the seed? You plant the seed and then the thing grows."

   The thing is a banana tree. She is worried that we don't have any bananas, that they no longer exist, that she will never get to eat another banana. And she is hungry.

   So I look at her, I get close to her face and I say, "Yes, but after we plant, we have to water the seed, too, or it dies." She peers at me confused but then she says, "That's right." She is hopeful that my sensible mention of caring for the seed means there will be a banana here soon.
   And I say, "And then when the tree grows up it is really tall, too tall for us to climb, so someone has got to climb up there or the monkeys get our bananas. Do you want to do it?"
    "Oh, I can't," she says. 
   She is worried, really worried.
   I look at her like, "Excuses." But I say, "We simply have got to fight those monkeys."

   She starts laughing. She laughs and laughs.
   "We already have the umbrella," she says.
   
   I don't think I have said this often enough yet: My oldest friend is dying. No, I am not alright.

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.