Truly, dear

   Mom was precious today, flirty, funny and wiggling her nose. 

   We read headlines out of the newspaper, including a story about the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. I don't think she recognized the characters or the show, but the headline "Live long and prosper, y'all" cracked her up.

   She started asking me how she could get the daily newspaper delivered, and at first I kept telling her that she simply had to ask me. I could make it happen. Then I started telling her she had to ask "Celia."
   "Oh, she's a wonderful person."

"I Love You Truly" first appeared in 1901 as part of
Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose, but
it was covered in Mom's heyday by everyone from Bing to Edith Bunker.

   "She certainly is."

   "And you see her often?"
   "Yes, I see her every day."
   "You will ask her about the newspaper?"
   "I will do that."
   "Did she curl your hair?" 

   Uhh ...  "She did. She's kind of a slob. She doesn't wear makeup."
   "She doesn't?!"

   I read her horoscope — Gemini — which said, "Exercise, reading, studying music — these are not frivolous extras to reward yourself with when you are 'good.' They are keys to your happiness and as important as other things you do to keep life running smoothly.

   "You know the horoscope lady is pulling this stuff out of her hat," I said. "She sits down with a Manhattan and her ballpoint pen and makes it up."

   Mom giggled, and then, as though surprised, she gazed at the print of the Betsy Ross painting and said, "That's a beautiful painting." Then we were right back to how could she get the daily newspaper. 

   But out of the apparent blue maybe 10 minutes later, she said, "Exercise is important. I exercise all day."

   "You also need music in your life. Do you have some music?" I asked, wondering if she was really referring back to the horoscope.

   She didn't even blink, she sang out, "I love you truly." Just the one line. 

   But that is a high class ballad. It only needs a line or two to get the job done.

   "And we just ask you for the newspaper?"
   "Just ask, and it shall be yours. But don't forget the magic word, 'please.'"
   "I would like the newspaper ... please."

Little blessings everywhere

   I can't sleep.
   My hip hurt Sunday after walking around with mushroom hunters, so I indulged myself and skipped my usual visit to the nursing home. But that doomed today to be the "bad" day — day of resentment, day of doom.
   I dug into work all day, savoring lunch, pausing to check in with people — delaying the inevitable — half hoping I'd become just too busy to remember to leave work in time to go over there.
   But we must do what must be done. That's what love means. Figure out how to make yourself do what must be done. Break it into baby steps. Take smaller bites of it. Don't tell yourself you are doing the whole thing, just do the thing that leads to the thing that leads to doing the thing.
   Focus on the time that is the drive, enjoy that. Look, new pavement in Dark Hollow. Look at the orange tone in those yellow stripes. Oh, that greenhouse that used to be Lakewood Gardens is busy. Lots of traffic on JFK today. Here's your chance to sing. Sing something so your voice doesn't completely dry up. Don't rush, don't run over that motorcycle man. ...

   Poor Mom. Imagine how she would feel if she knew driving to see her was a chore?
   With her, those moments expand into a kind of eternal time, so sweet and so precious. But it's like saying goodbye. And every visit, once again it comes time to leave and that's like saying goodbye forever. Over and over, is this the last of those friendly eyes?
   Leave feeling OK or crushed or warm and fuzzy, but with a settled sense of finality.
   And then in a day or so it's time to go see her again.
  What if this time she's vomiting or awful or crying or what if I've neglected to do what I should have done for her and she's hurting or lost?
   What if she knew, really knew, what a First World ingrate she produced?
   She would be so hurt to read this.
   I would be devastated if she could read this.
   Ingratitude is its own punishment.
     
   Asleep with her mouth open.

   The afternoon aide was with her, moving things around preparatory to waking her for the changing of the diaper and applying the cream to the place that keeps trying to become a bedsore, the getting another aide and the mechanical lift and putting her in her gerichair for supper. Jamie. A stocky young woman with an open face.
   My sister Mary had sent miniature yellow roses from her garden, and while I figured out where to place the little vase so Mom would see when she woke up, Jamie said, "I found a way to make her go right off to sleep at night. Did Sunny tell you? When I put her down I say, 'Julia, we're going on a trip to Rhode Island.' She settles right down."
   The tears hit me like a seizure. I grabbed this stranger and hugged her for a long time.
   How did she learn to say that to my Mom?

   How good and how kind.
   

In which we offend decency

  Mom was parked by the side door this afternoon, with a view beyond the Exit sign of a driveway, a tree and the birdfeeder I hung in that tree last month and really ought to refill. She was quietly muttering. As I came along the hall I heard her, over and over: "I am now a man. Oh, God! I don't know how to pee!"

 

   Dropping my stuff on the floor and getting set to crouch beside her for an hour, I thought, "Huh. This is what we're doing today." Aloud I said, "Well, you'd better learn how."
   She nodded earnestly, and searching my face asked, "How am I supposed to do that?"
   Meanwhile I was busy scanning her, looking for anything that would explain a physical complaint. In general, if she has a complaint, something is wrong. It's not likely to be whatever she's complaining about, but something's wrong.
   No puddles, no trapped arms or legs, so I cast at random: "You watch one of them do it. Watch what he does and do that. Each one see one, each one teach one."
   "Oh God," she wailed, "I don't know how to peeeeee."
   I started wondering how many residents were in the Bistro, just out of sight but within earshot.
   "Each one see one, each one teach one," I said. "See one, teach one."
   "I don't know any men," she said. "Where do I see one?"

   Pause here to acknowledge that this was perceptive. Hardly any men in her life now.
   "It is almost all women here," I allowed.
   "I need to learn to pee," Mom said. 

   And then she said it about 10 more times, while I tried to change the subject. I thought I'd gotten her thinking about Latin when, as she paused between Oh Gods to look at the Exit sign and say, "That sign. Exit," I said, "He, she, it goes out" and her head cocked. I thought I had her, but her reply was just, "I need to learn to peeee."
   Hopeless. 

   So I brought out the floor show I'd prepared — a couple of children's picture books. Reading baby books with her has, sometimes, been a lovely segue into getting her to talk about my granddaughter, Clémentine, whom she's met and also seen in photos and videos.
   Sometimes the books themselves enchant her. She still asks me about "How to Find Gold" by Viviane Schwarz. She did so again today — between asking me who Clémentine was and telling me that she had to learn to pee, and saying she'd seen the baby and the baby was trying to talk.
   Until, suddenly, Mom announced she could now pee.
   She had learned how to do it.
   "I watched one," she crowed. "I can pee like anything.
   "I watched one. I can pee all over the place."

   "Good job," I said, continuing to turn the pages of a book titled "Where Do Pants Go?"

   Sunny rolled up in her wheelchair to roll her eyes, hand me a printout of the nursing home schedule and tattle a bit on other residents. Normally I let Sunny draw my attention off Mom, but today I didn't look at her, I talked to her while showing Mom another book about a lemming that looks like the wooden head of a golf club but teaches other lemmings to eat pizza instead of jumping off a cliff.
   Every time Mom said, "I can pee all over the place," she laughed, and her eyes were so merry that pretty soon I was laughing too and bragging about how great I can pee.
   Sunny decided to roll someplace else.
   

   "My teeth need to be cleaned," Mom announced. As I walked into the Bistro to get a cup of water to swab her mouth out, three old ladies in wheelchairs stared at me like I was a cockroach. But when the still-smart one who lives across the hall, Clara, snickered, I knew it was all good.
   

   So what brought this on? It could have been recombinant past conversation, of course, something my sister said that Mom had too thoroughly digested; but I think it was a simple physical puzzle she couldn't solve: The aides lift her from her bed to the chair by rolling her onto a lift blanket that has four straps, one on each corner. The straps are gathered together and slipped over a hook on the mechanical lift. The aides leave the blanket underneath her when they put her into the chair.
Today, one of the straps had fallen into her lap and was, well, pointing the right direction, with her hand touching it. I think she could see that, but they'd tucked her knit throw beside her so, maybe, perhaps, she was unable to sort through the sensations.
   Possibly her problem-solving mind put two and two together to make 22: "I am a man now!"
   

   The fact that she was willing to take that in stride — OK, this is what we're doing today — is totally like the old Mom. So is how happy it made her to have learned something new.

Songs they have sung for a thousand years

   Mom watched me as I took down the Pilgrims, trying not to tear the print or the wall. Those removable strips are usually reliable, but if you tug too hard or at the wrong angle, the wall is wounded.
   In its place I hung up her old classroom poster of Betsy Ross showing the American flag to two guys while her daughter shows a dolly to George Washington. Betsy's ankles are exposed and she's blushing. I'm not at all sure what is supposed to be going on in the image.

   Mom said, "That's a beautiful picture."
   She said, "That never happened."
   She said, "Captain Loyall is dead."
   She said, "Did you do that beautiful picture?"
   She said, "That never happened."

   I put on the CD of the Sound of Music, and over the course of about an hour and a half, she told me about 15 times "that never happened" and asked again if I had made the beautiful picture. But she loves Julie Andrews, really loves her voice, and I hoped the music would delight her eventually. It did.
   After a while, she started to sing one line: "The hills are alive."
   I praised her like she was a child handing me a birthday present.

   When Sunny wheeled in and began monopolizing my focus, Mom added to her rotation of statements, "Are you going to sing it?"
   And so I found myself awkwardly listening to Sunny talk about her troubles and the latest gossip in the home — the new social worker walked out after two weeks — while singing along with Andrews' high, clear soprano and probably screeching. Mom and I are good altos, but we're altos. I tried singing while looking Sunny straight in the eyes, and nodding.
   So weird.

   Mom said, "You're wonderful."
   Mom sang, "The ... hills ... are... alive."
   Mom said, "I hate being old."
   Mom said, "I love you."
   Mom said, "Are you going to sing it?"
   Mom said, "That never happened."
   Mom said, "Captain Loyall is dead."

   I did sing it, really, really well.

Evidence

   Mom is not who she used to be, and for the past two years, that fact has been a stone in my shoe, a lump in my throat, a poignant sunset, the last leaf, a good fig, a mystery, a hole, an offense.

   Earlier this week it was an offense. I have been beyond upset. Should I be angry or depressed? Which would have been saner?

   Duty demands I not blame my Mom for the things she says, because she is not this person I am charged with loving. The frail and failing being in the bed, incapable, vulnerable, helpless, confused, nearly always sunny but sometimes not, is not my mom.

   But I can blame the universe.

   She was in a mood so dark it surprised me. Her hair needed a good washing; that might have been the problem. When my hair's greasy, I hate everybody. 

   But it was the hissing.

   She kept saying, "Oh God" and then groaning out the words, "More Pilgrims."

   I knew she was looking at her dear old laminated print of the Pilgrims on their way to church, stopping in the snowy woods to stare out at the viewer.

   "Oh God. More Pilgrims," Mom groaned. "So many of them are blacks."

  

   Dad was born in or near 1905, and although he worked in the War on Poverty and the OEO during most of my young life, he was a child of Mississippi County, Arkansas. Instinctively, he experienced skin color as a marker for intellect, and he felt he needed to help black and brown people, that it was his duty to "reach down" — even when he knew that was a crude stereotyping. He would marvel at educated black people as "articulate," for example. Get a drink or three in him, and out came the N word. But he had personal courage, and more than once I saw him confronting himself, calling himself out on his biases. Trying to be better than he was.

    My complicated dad.

    Mom was so much better. Twenty years younger, more empathetic, the child of Irish immigrants who had been discriminated against and denied opportunities because they were Irish. Long before she became a special ed teacher, she taught in a migrant school, and then she taught in a segregated school where all the students were black, before and a year after Texas decided to enforce desegregation. 

   When that school's textbooks were finally upgraded, Mom brought home the old ones to show me, so I would stop imagining that I must be smarter than most black kids just in general because I was smarter than everybody. 

   Those were some torn and dirty textbooks, and they had been used in the white school before they were discarded — given to the black school.

   "Do you think you would be making straight A's if you only had these books to read?" she asked me. "You're a smart girl. Some of the kids I teach are very smart, too. But they don't get the help you get."

   I'll never forget that, or the respect she routinely showed people in service occupations, how she knew not just the names but the life stories of janitors, clerks, secretaries and security guards, who so often were people of color.

   She was conscientiously, gently an advocate for justice. 

   

   And now, sometimes, she hisses the word "blacks."

   I feel helpless. What is there to do, but be my mother's child?

   So I turned to the woman in the bed and I said, more firmly than I felt, "No, Mom, no. We like black Pilgrims. Black Pilgrims are our friends."

   But she's not there.

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.