saying nothing

Felt the edges of summer today, felt the heat pull away, leave me. A fine crystalline cool came in its place. It's September, so fall is present, I just haven't noticed. Day five for Mom at Mirabella, day eight for me of Mom's ordeal. We sit here together, her in her wheelchair (that took two people to arrange her in) and me in a straight-backed chair close by. My back and neck are aching--so much sitting when I am use to moving, being--occupying a world much larger than the one Mom has been reduced to. Wordless. The two of us, and Lorna, Mom's companion, wordless too. Through Mom's window, I can see the sun glinting off the roof of a nearby building--the Greyhound storage facility, where they park, presumably, buses not currently needed. Lorna giggles just then, joking that maybe she will hop on one of those buses we can see--take herself to Vancouver to see her children and grandchildren, a long long ways from her husband, a religious zealot who has no patience for Lorna's beautiful soul. I giggle along with her, but then feel the need to tell her that, alas, this is not the Greyhound bus station but rather their bus barn for tired, unused machines. She will have to walk the extra four blocks to Stewart and 9th if she wants to escape the tyranny of her husband. She says nothing then, and we both are suddenly silent, turning our attention to Mom. We watch her head loll to the right, and her shoulders slump along back into the her wheelchair.

Mom seems worse today, her attention perhaps occupied by the gravity of her situation. But do I really know this? All day her neck rolls to the side and sometimes forward and her eyes slip into tired slits, where she can see nothing but the blackness of her closed eyelids. When I show her a picture of my cat, Cougar, offering her my phone with the picture in view, she says, "I can't see anything." I realize just then that this is because her eyes are closed, her lids shut down. Mom doesn't seem to notice this fact, thinking instead that there just isn't any light.

I can feel myself slow down to Mom's pace, feel my heart pound more deliberately and my eye lids begin to lower to half-mast. Soon, I think, I will be half-asleep like Mom, nearly lost. The two of us here, lost to the present world of her incapacitates. Paralysis is apparently contagious.

Mom's nutritionist comes to Mom's room--she asks a lot of questions about what Mom likes and doesn't like, what Mom can eat and can't eat. I am relieved, here at last is conversation, albeit about food. I am reminded how Mom and I use to spend hours looking at cookbooks, salivating over recipes we may or may not actually endeavor to make. Just the slow savor of the salty and sweetened words on our tongues was enough. Now, I listen as Mom tries to explain to the nutritionist why she doesn't like shellfish. I feel the need to correct her, help her, to tell her that it's just clams she doesn't like--other shellfish are okay. I also feel the need to tell the story of Mom's food poisoning, how she and I had dinner at the Oyster Bar at the Plaza in New York City years ago and how Mom got violently ill over the clam linguine. I'm digging deep, trying to retrieve Mom's past for her, retrieve the things she may no longer have a memory for or at least not the words to explain. But why? Why does this matter? Can't I learn to say nothing?

When I leave Mom's room, I feel leaden, emptied, like Mom has taken something from me, when in fact, I've just given something to Mom: the gift of my time with no agenda in sight. I try to be okay with this, but find that I can't shake the look on her face, how it said nothing, absolutely nothing. Nothing is something that is hard for me to understand.

As I give my security badge to the valet parking guy and wait for my car to appear, I think--how can all of this be here when Mom is there in her room with only the view of her knees in sweatpants and then the well-traveled Burber carpet that extends out from wall to wall in her room. I think of what will greet me when I get home--my cats, the sadly empty refrigerator, the tile floor in need of washing, the mail in need of sorting. I've not been shopping in several weeks, so there's not much to look forward to in the kitchen. All of this, and really nothing about this that matter. All that matters is Mom.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--