How rain feels

It may appear to be September 6th, but in my mind it's a different date....well past midnight but still Saturday, September 5th, Mom's first full day in skilled nursing. The hour's late but I find I have words to say. Sleep can wait.

When I wake up, rain is coming down, thick and puddling, feels wetter than any rain I can remember. Wet like the lake slapping the dock adjacent to my back door. Wet like how a shower feels after my run--more than just drops. A deluge. It's been a summer of sun and and more sun, so the messy drippings on my face and hands as I leave my house this morning feel unaccustomed, despite the fact that everyone likes to say--"it's Seattle"--as if this is a universal truth about the likelihood of precipitation or the general undesirability of rain. In fact, I embrace the rain, even when it's inconvenient. Revel in it when I run, soak it in when I scurry to teach class. Savor every drop of it.

Through the double-paned glass of Mom's 2nd floor room, of course, none of these sloppy drippings can be heard. Just the clatter of lunch trays lifted from Mom's neighbor's room or the soft patter of words exchanged between nurses and therapists. I can't exactly hear these voices, just the occasional word--"report," "respiration," "rounds"--uttered as a backdrop to what is going on so urgently for Mom. Time moves differently here, cocooned in the language of heart rates, blood pressures, diaper changes, sponge baths, oxygenation rates, all things that I hadn't given much thought to prior to Mom's decline a year-and-a-half ago. Recently, a dear friend of mine announced that her aspiration is to be fully present, a laudable goal, one that I work on myself. But really, none of this conversation with Laura can even touch the meaning of "present" for Mom. As I lie there beside Mom on her hospital bed this afternoon, I try to close down my world, fold in its edges to approximate Mom's. I curl my right arm around Mom's shoulders, taking hold of her flesh--her shoulders feel material, like they might move at her command, if asked. And I feel the deceit of this--how the body can hide incapacity: it's not really a body at all, I think, nothing like the calves and biceps and lateral muscles I associate with my own working, laboring body. What would it be like, I ask myself, to have no further aspiration than to hold my own body steady in a seated position, unaided, rather than flopping over flat on my face or backward off the bed? What would it be like to aspire to lift my forefinger to my nose on command? Unimaginable, because these are things I readily assume....about myself, my body. They are givens. And yet there it is, the quotidian as the entirety of Mom's world. Real as can be. As unreal, unreliable as Mom's flesh has now proven to be. Really, just a facsimile of my mom.

Mom's OT sat with Mom today for fifteen minutes, trying to encourage her right hand to reach up and grab hold of a terry wash cloth hanging like a veil from her head. "Pull that cloth down from your head," the OT Becky says kindly and patiently. I watch Mom's eyes, trying to see if she is thinking, focusing. "Are you listening, Mom?" I want to ask, because her face is blank. "Are you there Mom?" I want to know. Without thinking, I read every muscles, willing my eyes to see a twitch of recognition in her visage. A minute or two passes, and I feel terror for each of these seconds now going by. Oh my God, I am thinking, where has she gone? Please Mom, I will her. Please. And then, I see her right fingers begin to shake, her forefinger and thumb pinching the air like a crab cornered in one of my crab-pots I bait and coax through the crabbing season in early summer. I want to jump up and kiss those flailing, snapping fingers--I'm thinking...oh, thank God, she's not left me yet. There's still time! So we sit there, Mom and I and Becky. Minutes go by. We sit and watch and Becky asks Mom in as many ways as possible--"take that cloth down from the top of your head." I'm exhausted by Becky's iterations of language (I mean how many ways can you say this), by Becky's patience, by Mom's demonstrated incapacities. Mom reaches out towards Becky's words with that pinching right hand, swaying to the right and the left, as if looking for something to lock onto to....but she can't find it, can't find the cloth because, of course, it's up over her head not out there in front of her. I watch, breathless, willing her to figure it out, to understand where her hand is in relation to the cloth. I want to say--stop, I can't stand this, can't stand this display of lack, of frustration--but I don't. Becky is just doing her job, I know. Gradually Becky lowers the cloth down inch by inch over her forehead, over her eyes and cheeks till she can't see Becky and I can't see Mom's eyes and nose and chin. Still, she can't grasp that damn cloth. The enormity of this makes my eyes rim with tears, but Mom can't see. The cloth is there between us. Tears come down. Like rain. Rivulets of frustration and grief wash my temples and cheeks. No one sees. Eventually, Becky grabs hold of Mom's hand and lifts it high to the sky and along the way she feels the cloth and down the cloth comes. Thankfully, the ordeal is over. Becky has learned what she needs to know--"motor planning deficits," she says, not to mention a lack of understanding of where the right side of her body is in relation to the space round her. Mom knows intuitively she has failed (though no one has told her this) but cannot know what this failing might mean. And me, I know exactly what it means. Mom is paralyzed completely on her left side. Her right hand and leg have very very limited mobility. Mom's had a "wet stroke"-- a large bleed into her brain. This is not the first and it won't be the last. Mom's arteries in her brain are thinning as we speak, getting brittle and whisper-fine. Every pulse of blood is a bomb waiting to happen. While I'm working out in the gym, building muscle, Mom is building traps for herself, arteries that can't stand the test of time and she can't do a thing about it. Neither can I. Neither can her doctors. Mom had one other major bleed in October of 2008....and then a slew of smaller bleeds after this, ones we knew nothing about. And now this--the biggest one to date. With her newly stroked-body, Mom can talk. She can laugh. She can sob. But she can't move any part of her body without a near-full assist. Mom is imprisoned in her own flesh. And here I am, looking on. Powerless to do a thing.

I think then--I want to be somewhere else, somewhere far away from this, from Mom. What I can't see, can't hurt me as acutely? Right? So, I journey away from Mom in my head, just for a moment--imagine myself on my favorite spot on the rugged beach at Yellowbanks, on the Olympic Peninsula (hence the picture at the beginning of this blog). I imagine how the sand would feel, clammy and abrasive against the soles of my feet, and the air, sodden, as it always is--so much moisture it has no where to go but drop from the sky to what waits below. Wet and more wet. Just like the rain. But my thinking head knows this isn't going to work, that this is absurd. This isn't how it is. Running doesn't get me any closer to Mom, closer to being okay with Mom's new body, new self. The only way out is to go through. So I reach over to Mom, take her right hand in mine, the one that feels just a little. I squeeze hard, again and again, trying to make sure she can feel me here, right beside her, fully present. I squeeze until my hand is tired, and just when I think I will give up, that I can't do this anymore, I feel the faint tug of her thumb and forefinger against mine. A Morse code of sorts. Something that says, yes, I am here, yes we are here together. And I sob, despite myself. Relief rains down. Maybe for both of us.

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