Glaciers have reshaped continents, I feel, in the length of time it is taking me to realize that my mother has been leaving me synapse by synapse for years and that I'm not going to get my Mom back, ever. She and I have both been really angry about this. It's not like she purposely went out and bought a ticket to dematerialize so my anger is really a foreshadowing of sorrow to come and hers, a testament to how much she has loved her life.
I'm beginning to grasp that a part of me is always going to be grieving for what is irrevocably lost and a part still expecting that entropy will reverse it's progression even as I come to understand that it is only these losses that save us from being blind, uninformed, impervious to the extent of our vast love of each other and this earth.
I watch Nova with my hair prickling, anger and awe battling sadness, as the latest statistics on Asian elephants or leopards are released along with videos demonstrating all we are just learning about their true value to the world, their social complexity, ‘loyalty’ or capacity for ‘joy’ etc.
There are no more Banks Island Wolves but, thank God, I never knew one or understood anything about them and so am spared the sharpness of the more personal loss made inevitable with familiarity. And yet it is personal loss that saves our hearts from oblivion.
Mother, that pristine mid-west beauty, that bone-honest independent spirit that raised me and my two sisters, looks at me archly through her ‘new’ sunglasses, her unwashed Howard Hughes hair is lifting in the breeze like a flying cat and she ignores me pointedly as she tries to pet it into submission with her shaky 91 year old hand. We are on our way to one of the three eye specialists required by her condition and for whom she has little respect.“I don’t think they know what they are doing,” she says acidly.
I know in the deep recesses of her shabby old purse is a fist full of clippings about developments in eye care she’s cadged from the newspaper and is dying to show Dr. X as proof of this incompetence.
All I’d done was ask her where she’d gotten her new sunglasses. She seems to have a different pair each time I see her. Assisted Living doesn’t sell them so it’s a mystery along with the sudden aversion to shampooing that she developed upon landing there. I am momentarily uncomfortable with the suspicion that somewhere, close by, some old man is groping around for his missing aviators and feeling incompetent and decrepit because he can't find them. But Mom is not revealing her sources or reasons and if you want to seriously annoy her, just mention hair salons or eye doctors or try to pin her down about sunglasses.
Mother selected this particular sanctuary for her retirement home just a few years ago when she was still happily tooling around in her little blue Honda, having the savvy to park with the most recent fender bender nosed into a bush so perhaps the mishap wouldn’t be noticed, and so I’m still surprised that she has to pause and consider, each time she leaves her apartment, hoping to get it right with the first guess, which way the dinning room is likely to be found.
What about this phenomenon can I embrace? I am awash in gratitude that she lived long enough to demonstrate creativity in dealing with loss. As I scrub food scum off her lapels, which she is vigorously asserting is not there and no one will notice anyway, I’m secretly as proud of her feistiness as I am vexed by her unwillingness to be guided in anyone. I can let myself be charmed, as I accept my birthday present of a carefully wrapped box of candy prizes she has scored at Jingo. I've begun a gratitude list. It is evolving. Even when we think we do, the truth is we don't begin to suspect the value of what we have until it is sliding out of existence.
My mother has found a safe harbor. As long as she can avoid infections, be respectfully herded through her routines and read the newspaper with scissors in hand, we can maybe keep her with us. But the membrane between her being here and her not being here is monstrously thin. Like an endangered species in a narrowing ecological niche, like our very personalities, we're okay today, maybe. For tomorrow, like the rest of the planet, all bets are off.
No comments:
Post a Comment