this is my mother

"Look at this one," I say to Mom. "Who do you think these people are?"

I'm holding a photo out to Mom, a black and white studio shot that looks like it was taken at the turn of the century.There are two rows of somber, over-dressed people, all of them from the "Nilsen family" (as the back of the photo reads) and all of them from Kumle, Norway. On the back is printed in neat penmanship the birth dates (from 1867-1884) for each of them as well as their names and when they immigrated to Seattle. So they must all be related, I think--three brothers and two sisters. The men look alike--small mustaches and effeminate heart-shaped faces. The women look grim; both have white pleated blouses cinched tight at the waist with their hair swept up into buns on the tops of their heads, as was the custom in 1900. The women, Nikoline and Rakel, pose in identical, uncomfortable stances--their hands looped behind their backs and their noses slightly raised to the photographer's lens. The men, Johannes, Engel and Magnus, look like near-carbon copies in their dark suits and white collars and hands placed in the same fashion on the tops of their thighs. Only their varied tie patternings suggest that these are three different men rather than one reproduced three times.

I can tell Mom recognizes the family name--Nilsen--but this is the extent of what she can say. I too can remember Nilsens at family reunions in the past, but I can't place the names in this photo or think of what their link is to my mother's families--the Leirens and the Andersons who immigrated from a small town on a fiord just outside Bergen.

Mom gestures and murmurs--her voice is still breathy, the air sucked right out of it. I have to lean in to hear what she might have to say about the Nilsens--I don't want to miss a word. We sit there for quite some time, me leaning in to her left side in my straight-backed institutional chair and Mom careening to the right, slumped in her wheelchair; I'm trying to follow the OT's suggestion that Mom can begin to learn to sit straight by having her company sit on her weaker side (so she can learn to straighten-up).

"Who are the Nilsen's?" I ask Mom again, not wanting to give up on this quite yet.

"Well...well...you know...from the old," and then her words peter out.

"What was that again Mom?" I ask, trying to practice patient listening--what Mom needs now to coax the words out of her mouth.

When she doesn't say anything more just then and instead moves her gaze to the floor rather than looking at the photo, I realize that I may have to give up on this.

The simple fact of Mom's lowered gaze fills me with fear, the kind that breaks a sweat and causes the heart to pump with unexpected abandon. I've waited too long, I say to myself. I've waited too long to ask these questions. Too long.

These past few years there's always been something else that needed doing--papers I needed to grade or meetings I needed to attend or food that needed to be shopped for--that prevented me from systematically talking Mom through her family photos. It's not that I haven't visited Mom--on the contrary, I'm a constant presence in her house. It's just that it takes time and patience to hunt through Mom's photos, as none of them are organized and, even before this stroke, Mom's speech has been circuitous and difficult to follow.

Now that Mom's so ill, I feel a strange compulsion to know all of her family background, even the trivia, because when Mom dies it will all die with her. She's the last of her generation from the old country. Who will know these stories then, who will keep my ancestors safe?

Here at the Mirabella, we've been looking at photos for over an hour...old ones of people I mostly don't recognize. Mom has boxes and boxes of pictures stacked in her bedroom closet; one of these boxes is at the Mirabella. When I opened the lid a bit ago I found two folders marked "genealogy"; I grabbed these at once, thinking answers might be found here. But when I opened their glossy bindings I found pieces of random paper--some of them interesting, some of them not. There are brochures after brochures from various genealogy organizations: The Minnesota History Center in Sandpoint, Idaho, The Dakota Territorial Museum in Yankton South Dakota, The American Family Immigration Center in New York City, The National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, The Eastside Heritage Center. I'm surprised by how much time Mom has put into her genealogy project--something else I haven't known about my mother. And then the loose yellow legal pad pages filled with Mom's black penmanship--scrawling and difficult to read, even this long ago. Phone numbers, birth dates and death dates, and then name after name, some of them with lines drawn between them to indicate some kind of relationship. Some of these markings make sense to me but most of them are a puzzle, secrets that only Mom can decipher.The way her notes are scattered across the pages, with some "words" simply unintelligible suggests that Mom was having a difficult time gathering her thoughts--that the Alzheimer's was already present. "Anderson H536 Enter Roll 8 long" means nothing to me. Neither does--"M J 2 1 K5 40. Roll 346 him." Microfiche, I ask myself? And then what appears to be a web address--www.Jewisten.org/databases/E1018/Ellis.html. Mom doesn't even know how to turn on a computer, I think to myself with surprise, much less use a keyboard and find a website. And all of these numbers and symbols are wobbly, incontinent really, as they dribble across the page with different slants to the letters and many cross out lines and places where it looks like her pen might have sat too long on the face of the paper before moving on.

And then, finally something I do recognize--my grandfather Dida's arrival to the US in 1908 from Bergen and Berentina's arrival to North Dakota in 1912 where she stayed with her sister Sina for a bit before coming to meet and marry my grandfather in Seattle. Berentina stayed just long enough outside of Fargo on the farm to learn about her sister's rotting teeth, Sina's twelve children, the cruel and incessant toil of the farm, the harshness of the seasons, the absence of books and music and "culture," the incessant meals for the family and the farm crew six times a day. In short, Berentina learned how brutal this life was for women and knew immediately it wasn't for her. As an acclaimed chef and a woman of great beauty, she had more possibilities than this. (See the queenly photo of Berentina at the time of her mariage; the second photo is Dida in his sixties with Mom and her sister Marguerite...Mom's the beauty on the right).

Mom's sigh then comes to me, loudly, interrupts my soliloquy about my grandfather and grandmother. Her sigh reads--"I have lost patience with this." Or perhaps, worse yet, "I am bored or tired." But really, as it turns out, Mom is just anxious to move on, put these pictures back to safety in their box. Apparently, she doesn't believe I can protect them, keep them safe from harm. They're just too precious.

After this road block, I decide to shift Mom's attention to something else, something less precious, less complicated. So I haul out a stack of more recent photos--taken in the early 1990s. They are glossy and colorful, in contrast to the Nilsen drab. I turn the 4x6 snapshots over and try to discern the date...but all I can read is "Aug 3"--no year. Judging from the kind of hair I sport--long and wavy as opposed to shorter and curly--I can guess the date of our camping excursion. We've hiked up to the lakes above Goat Lake in North Central Idaho. It's a blue blue Idaho day and the sun looks hot, as Mom and I are in shirt sleeves despite the elevation, approximately 8700 feet. Mom's leaning uncomfortably against a large white boulder, one of those incongruous mammoth stones that are left behind as glaciers melt and moraine crumbles. There's no lake in sight because we are perched on the rise between Goat Lake and the higher, wilder lakes.

When I show Mom the photo, it takes ten second are so for her to see the glossy 4x6 because her lids remain shut.

"I can't see anything," she says with what sounds like a bit of fear.

And I remind her then with a smidgen of impatience, "If you open your eyes, Mom, you'll be able to see, even with the cataracts." Once her eyes open up to something more than a slit and focus on the picture of herself in the white boulder field, the most unexpected thing happens--Mom leans back her head and begins to howl. Just like a coyote. And I mean literally howl--"aroo....aroo....aroo....aroo," she screams with her chin jutting straight up in the air, despite the debility of her stroke. And for a moment I am so taken aback that all I can do is stare at her, at the strangeness of this. Instantly I remember the origins of this howl--a ritual of sorts: what she and I would let loose in our exuberance when we'd reach the summit of a day's climb. Something so sweet, knowing we'd earned it by the sweat of our skin.

"Aroo...aroo....aroo...aroo," she repeats again, even more loudly into the antiseptic institutional air.

And as I listen this time to her roar, I hear an echo, another howling song that's coming from this very room, from my own lips in fact.

"Aroo....aroo....aroo...aroo," I sing back to her, without even intending to do so. My lips just move by themselves and my head leans back in symbiosis with Mom's

When she hears me, Mom lowers her chin and opens her eyes to look directly at me. Our pupils connect just then, lock tight, and for the first time in a very long time I feel like this is my mother. My mother.

Together we explode into another plaintive yawl, another duet of a song, just like we did when she and I lived in an easier time, a time before there were reasons for she and I to disagree, to not understand each other.

So here we sit, two women in our separate chairs, letting our tongues sing together, our voices bend as one to an uncommon joy.

More than the meaning of happy.

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