There's a place I go, at least twice a year, sometimes with Mom and sometimes not. It's a mountain place and boots are required--stiff, waterproof kind-of-shoes, like what Mom would procure from REI every three to four years. I see it as a rite of passage--a place to observe the giving over of spring into summer and summer into fall. Not a difficult passage--seven miles round trip, with a point of departure from the parking lot at Alpental, Snowqualmie Pass. I make this passage once in the late spring and once every fall--it's essential.
Today I come because I'm transitioning myself, from a summer of writing to a fall of teaching. And I make this passage because Mom cannot--I'm walking these miles for her because it's something we've done so many times, something she'd like to be doing right now but cannot. I have the proper shoes; she no longer does.
After registering with the Forest Service--a scant piece of paper that announces where I am going and when I'm returning--I take on the trail as it moves steeply up the side of the hill overlooking Alpental. The woods are thick, deeply damp, despite our September drought. I can see the evidences of spring--the Queen's Cup still throbbing green, it's rabbit-eared leaves blooming even if the delicate lily-flower is not. And the Solomon Seal and Trillium are still blazing-on, though yellowed and crisp around the edges and soon to be turning towards the earth for winter. As I get higher, vine maples line the trail, already blushing maroon with the evening chill that's been coming on the past few weeks. The only flowers still visible are the "pussy toes"--what my brothers and I called these humble balls of white fluff when hiking as children. They're hardly flowers at all.
Soon, too soon, the trail moves out and away from the woods, leaving me to face full on the 80 degree sun (even at this time of day) and the thick dust scrimming the fields of moraine cascading down the hill to my right. The rocks around and on this trail are prolific. I spend the next thirty minutes looking down intently at the trail, as I mount switchback after switchback, trying to ignore the heat. And in my looking I am searching persistently for an uncommon stone--a rock that announces itself as not just beautiful but also endemic to the landscape. This is something Mom and I would do--search for stones to transport home as a record of where we'd been. For mom, this habit becomes an obsession, yielding basket upon basket of grey-to-black rocks, their origins long-since lost from memory. Whatever boyfriend I had at the time would be enlisted to help Mom carry "her rocks" home to safety, the weight of them sometimes exceeding ten pounds or more.
After thirty minutes, I give up the search, sure that there will be no uncommon stones. So, instead, I bend over and pick up a rather common grey rock, common but unaccountably smooth to the touch on both sides and embedded into the soil like paver-stones anchored in mortar. I turn the stone between my fingers, feeling it's heat and it's well-worn edges--thousands of feet have travailed over this particular rock. It's very commonness, I decide, produces an uncommon appeal. It's the perfect stone to bring back to Mom.
The trail to Snow Lake is a freeway of a trail--one has to be careful about when to summit to the lake in order to avoid what can only be called a rush-hour traffic jam. Reminds me of the trails out of Denver in the Rocky Mountain National Park, where the persistent traffic apparently warranted paving the trails into a concrete forest. Amazing really. Snow Lake is nearly this frequented, but it's path remains, thankfully, soil and rock and veined with root. So I compensate by choosing to travel at less popular times--such as during the week and after 5:00pm, both of which describe the geography of my journey today.
It's been a long day at Mirabella--so the allure of Snow Lake is accentuated: an opportunity to cram a seven mile hike into one-and-a-half hours so as to beat the dark. I revel in the challenge of it. Today, I walked Mom through OT and PT, observing without comment as Mom tries to do what the therapists require. Much of time she's staring off into space, seemingly oblivious to what is being asked. During ST, Mom takes twenty minutes to name five states--as it is, she only gets four--Oregon, Idaho, Washington and Montana. Lisa has the patience of Job, consistently redirecting Mom back to the question at hand, instead of attending to other more present matters, like the man she thinks she sees crouching in the corner of her room, a hallucination that neither Lisa nor I can make sense of. On the electrical exercise bike, Mom's legs (with E-stem electrodes attached to them) go around and round, without her in-put at all. I touch her on the shoulder and say--"Mom, look at your feet....push the pedals down as they come around." Her eyes are closed, so it takes a few second before her lids open. Startled, he looks first at me and then down at her feet. She says "yes," her standard response to all her therapists' requests, but then stares off into space again, nonrepsonsive. "What are you thinking , Mom?" I want to ask her. "What can't you attend to what's at hand?" But I say none of this, because I already know the answers. All the while I worry, incessantly, about whether Mom is doing enough, about whether her Alzheimer's will prevent her from making enough "progress" from her stroke for purposes of Medicare.
Mom's friend Jennifer (who is also her private-pay OT from before the stroke) said to me yesterday--"Your mother's world is the sensuality of the present...that's all she knows." Jennifer is right--Mom is caught up in present happenings, whether that be a person just entering the room or a sound she hears down the hall--all of these interrupt her ability to concentrate. They become what is "real." These "interruptions," these present events and sounds and emotions, are not interruptions at all but rather the entirety of Mom's world. This is what she knows and, as Jennifer points out, this is what I can be giving her. Right now. The present. Mom has but a small grasp on the past--events and people move in and out of focus, without her will, despite the reminders of photographs and memorabilia. And the future? Well, your guess is as good as mine as to what happens next--she's not able to think beyond the here and now. I need to get use to this, to stop wanting something otherwise. I can lay no claims on her beyond the present moment. Instead, she's my present tense and I am hers. And this will be enough. It will have to be.
When I summit to the lake, I expect elation but instead find myself aching and dull, lonely with the thought that I am here and Mom is there in her bed at Mirabella. There's no changing this. Mom is in her own "rite of passage"--where the body takes us before leaving us to do whatever is next. The lake looks its usual blue, the edges trimmed by pine trees and wild huckleberry. Along the far side, fields of stone tumble into the lake's immense depth and a sheer wall of rock rises from the lake's bottom to extend up to Gem and Wildcat Lakes high above and not yet visible to the eye. For this moment, there is no one here--no voices to interrupt what should be my calm. I guess no one is foolish enough to hike to this lake just before dark. If Mom were here, she'd be getting antsy, packing up her rucksack, getting out her flashlight, mumbling something about "danger" and the "dark." I do none of these things, as I am comfortable with the moment, despite the trail and the rocks and impinging night. I know this trail, even at this time of twilight.
Tomorrow I will gather up my syllabi for my students and drive to where I teach--Seattle University. It's the first day of class. I will talk the talk--tell them why they need this class and what a meaningful journey we will have together. And we will, I am sure of it, whether I feel this way right now or not, because this is something I know how to do and it matters to me, what my students learn, what they think about. And all the while, I will feel my mother there in her room, feel her grief and her anguish and her broken resolve. I will live her present tense just as I live my own, hoping that there are enough days left to be her daughter and for her to be my mother.
Later, after class, I will place that stone--the common rock from the Snow Lake trail--in her hand and I will tell her about my journey. I will use the most vivid words I know and I will work hard to join her in her present tense of sensuality, expectations put aside. It won't matter that tomorrow all of this will be forgotten--she won't even remember that I was there. The present is what she knows--the sweet curl of pear she juices between her lips...the lips we smack together in love before I leave. The present is what sustains her, moves her.
And I am her present.
Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--
No comments:
Post a Comment