A Transparency of Skin

The November sun angles through the window onto my mother’s thin arm resting on the worn oak kitchen table. We are in a house built high in the air; a treehouse perched above a brown ribbon of bayou. Every day she comments on the trees and sky as though they are her companions. The skin of her arm in the sunlight is transparent. The web of blue veins is illuminated like a map of tiny tributaries. I imagine them as different kinds of paths. Maps of hiking trails studied in that moment before you set out. A schematic of electrical circuitry. The patterned design of a turtle shell. Or as paths of energy, what they call Chi, the life force that binds all things in the universe. Her wedding band slips on a delicately bony finger. She is 98 years old, and when she says ‘Daddy’ I know she does not mean the man she was married to, my father, but her own. Their conversations are part of her solid memories that persist among the fleeting ones, like what we ate for lunch or how she fell and bruised her knee this week. I’m afraid the skin will tear in places, and she will leak out. Yet for nearly a century the skin has held this tough, compassionate and loving spirit tethered to the earth, the veins an imprint of one unique human life. One day she will leave both skin and veins behind.

She Will Find Me

I arrived to visit my mother on what would turn out to be one of her final days. I was informed that when the massage therapist arrived earlier in the day my mom told the therapist to please not bother her and to go away because she, my mother, was at church. When I went into her room, indeed she was sitting by the window with her eyes closed and a perfect Buddha smile on her lips. She seemed very content. I tried to interrupt her. She looked up at me and smiled and shook her head and waved me away gently. I sat back and let her be until she suddenly seemed to realize that I was there needing her attention. She came out of her trance to be with me, but reluctantly.

How many times in her life had a child interrupted her in whatever soulful activity she may have been engaged in? And how many times did she pull herself away to be present for them? I felt selfish; at that point I was needy, needing her to be present with me as much as possible, needing her to stay on this earth.

It did give me great consolation to see her in that state, in church as she called it. She had told me around that time, after the chaplain came to see her, that she didn’t need anyone to tell her how to pray, she had been doing it for a long time, and already knew how. When I saw him with her the one time, I couldn’t help sense that she was the priest and he, the supplicant. She took his hand in both of hers and gazed into his eyes to thank him for coming. He seemed a bit humbled by her attention, and responded awkwardly, his usual greetings seem to fail him.

Recently, while praying, I became very aware the ticking of the clock she had loved that now hung on the wall of my room. She loved to tell the story of how we found it at the hardware store in Fairhope, Alabama, all dirty and dusty on top of a box on the floor. Just waiting for us in the middle of a chaotic mess. She loved that clock. The clock seemed to be ticking very loudly, and I thought, that clock does not belong here. I opened my eyes and looked at it, then at some of her other things, her purse, which I have yet to empty, her statue of Mary, her photo of her parents. I felt strongly that these things did not belong here in my space. They were in the wrong place.

For decades, her physical space, where her body lived, with all of her things around her, was my refuge. I always said that I could sleep more soundly in her presence, under the same roof with her, than anywhere else. It made no difference if we had disputes and disagreements, or when she was unhappy with some of my choices. None of that seemed to matter. The core of the connection seemed to remain intact. I think that must be a unique blessing, at least that’s the sense I get talking to other people about their relationships with their parents. Or siblings, or anyone.

Now I try to recall the sensation I had when I was in her presence and most often, I am able to do it. I’m afraid that will fade with time. Because I lived far away from her, and visited several times a year, I think that the habit of this decades long practice is still with me. I am still waiting for the next time I will go home, and she will be there. That is painful, but grief is the other side of love, so I am thankful for it. As Rilke says, we should not beg for consolation for in losing the grief we lose the opportunity to continue to love and learn from that love.

What continues to surprise me is that I keep learning from her daily. From the life she modeled, from her embrace of death, from the shared sentiments of so many whose life she touched. She is teaching me still how to live a life of joy and service. And I believe that as long as I seek her out, she will continue to find me.

July 24, 2022

We left the hospital in the van from hell. I could not believe that the vehicle used by institutions created to heal and care for, in this case, the frail, sick and elderly, could be so entirely pieces of junk. My 100 year old mother, who had suffered a fractured femur repaired three days earlier with several screws, sat in her usual upright posture, strapped to a wheelchair that was held to the floor by four thick cords. None of this reinforcement seemed to keep her, and myself on the seat in front of her, from being jostled around like a blow up yard decoration in the wind. I wondered about patients with internal injuries, and if their transport would be handled any differently. Her poor leg, propped up on the foot holder of the wheelchair, jostled with every bump and hole of the parish roads leading to the rural town of Lacombe, north of New Orleans, the town where her parents had once had a home, passed down to her sister and her children who my mother had taken in over the years at various times of transition; where my brothers used to catch fish at the fish hatchery in the 50s. She had come full circle back to the land of her roots to heal.

During her three days at hospital, she had developed the idea that she was dying and that all this fuss was really not necessary. She had come up with several ideas to speed up the process. Can you just hit me over the head? How about one of those pills that just makes you go to sleep except you don’t wake up? Or how about just some whiskey? How much of this was the effect of the anesthetic and pain meds, I’ll never know. But in the van ride, it continued.

This must be strange for you. How many daughters get to go with their mothers like this to be buried? That’s where we’re going, isn’t it? To the cemetery?

When I tried to explain that she had broken her leg and was going someplace where we could get help to heal from it, she insisted that the leg didn’t hurt, that at this point in her life, why bother with all this, she was not going to be around long enough for any of this to matter. This was all said with a calm and serene, often flippant manner. No complaining or frustration, more of a commentary on the absurdity of it all.

As I consider this now, all the physical, occupational and speech therapy. The switch to pureed food, the leg braces, the exercises, I wonder: what if we had just brought her home, put her in a recliner next to a nice window, a potty chair nearby, let her eat and drink whatever she wanted and die there without all the institutional hassle.

Of course, you never know. How long will it be? Will she walk again? Will she aspirate her food and die of pneumonia? What should I be doing now? What’s the best solution for everyone?

I had her here close to me for three blessed months during the most glorious autumn I can remember. That’s what I know. The rest is past.