home: part two

This morning, washing the floor, I fall. Not enough to break but enough to bruise. Washing the white tile of my house is something I hate--I believe the tile hates me back, or at least it appears this way. After mopping there's a slick of water shimmering the tile, just enough to set my bare feet rolling like I'm slip-sliding on ball bearings. My fall is harder than I could have imagined. My hand bears the mark of my impatience: in a hurry to see Mom, in a hurry to get home again. "Home" has become memory for me, I spend so little time at my kitchen counter, in my bed, smooching my cats. Without home as a point of reference, my life's all about Mom.

When I get to the Mirabella--a feat considering the stop and go traffic between my home and her "home"--I am met with a barrage of bodies: my sister-in-law's, Lisa's (the care manager), Lisa's (the ST). Mom becomes simply a fixed object around which all these other bodies rotate. I fight the impulse to leave.

When everyone but my sister-in-law has retreated from Mom's world, Mom starts to become less an object and more her human self. My sister-in-law holds tight to Mom's hand for at least the next twenty minutes. I fight the urge to rip her hand from grasping Mom's. "She's not your mother!" I want to shout, but of course don't. Uncharitable thoughts, I realize--time for a more mature attitude, time for a re-frame. My sister-in-law thinks she knows best for my mom, but she doesn't. She has no right, legal or otherwise, to be making decisions for Mom. At the very least, she's an interested party (with a conflict of interest)--for her, much depends on whether Mom returns "home."

"Listen to this," I say, once everyone else has left Mom. "Ever heard of "Le Troisieme Age?" I'm reading to Mom from the Mirabella Monthly Newsletter. There's an article here about "the third age"--old age--which makes an argument that this phase of life can be the most rewarding, as we feel most at home inside our skin. I ask Mom what she thinks about this--does she feel "at home" with herself?

"It's like..." she says...."you know...our visit...what we said."

I'm thinking hard about who "our" is and which "visit" she's referring to and am initially stumped, as I sometimes am, by Mom's shorthand methods of communication. "Which visit?" I say back to her. Mom struggles again to make me understand--"our visit," she repeats, without further illumination. But then, as we both stare at each other with frustration, it comes to me, that Mom's referring to our chat with Paul, her nephew, and particularly our discussion several days ago about liking ourselves.

"Do you mean Paul, Mom?"

"Yes...yes...that's it," she sputters, as if this has been apparent all along. Inwardly I marvel. How could Mom have remembered this discussion all these days latter.

"Is this true for you, Mom," I then ask her "that you feel more comfortable in your own skin, more confident in your 'third age'"?"

She doesn't answer, and so there is silence as her eyelids close down like flags at half-mast. I am reminded that she didn't really answer my question that night with Paul either. I believe her response was--"I don't remember thinking about things like this when I was younger." Her befuddlement causes me to ask another question, a question I've been wanting to discuss for quite some time.

"Do you know, Mom, when you are, you know, clear and when you are less clear?"

This question has haunted me for months, years, as it has everything to do with whether Mom is processing her own mental decline.

"Yes," she says without much of a pause. We are sitting so close on her bed now that I can feel her body's heat like it's radiating from my own. Our thighs are pressed tight, skin and muscles cleaving, leaving little room for anything else. When she answers "yes" I don't know whether to be glad because she is cognizant enough to understand and answer my question or saddened because she too (like me) is experiencing the grief of losing her brain, her thinking self, her emotive self.

"Have you noticed," I continue, emboldened by Mom's honesty, "that you seem clearer when you are here at Mirabella? Same's true for your stint at Evergreen Acute Rehab."

Before Mom can answer, however, Lorna sails into the room, announcing that, if Mom and I want, we can go to the Activity Room and partake in an Avon sales event. I can't think of anything I'd less rather do. Mom agrees to, as she shakes her head. Both of us are wishing that Lorna will step back out of the room. Nothing against Lorna--she's Mom's best friend--and I am grateful to her, but I want to hear what comes next, what new treasure Mom may next let loose from her lips. Things she may not say it in front of Lorna.

Thankfully, Lorna does have an interest in Avon and she subsequently goes to find herself a screaming deal with make-up and skin products. Lorna is the best shopper I know--knows how to find the best deals. $100.00 purses for $15.00 dollars at Penney's, pants for $10.00 at the Macy's sale. I'm sure she''ll find Avon lipstick and hand cream for a remarkable price.

Nevertheless, I am relieved when she exits again, leaving the silence to open like a flower for Mom and me alone.

"Yes," Mom then says, referring back to my question about where she feels clear and where she feels less clear. "Yes....I know this," she says again, just to make sure I hear what she's saying. "What should we...you know...should we...do?"

I don't know how to answer Mom, because there are somethings I just can't say. Not yet. Like... "you're going to die Mom, sooner then we think, and I want you as clear as you can be--I want this for me, and I want it for you." Or..."please don't go home Mom...I just can't bear to lose you again, can't bear to see your mind wither away sooner than it needs to--please give us more time." But I say neither of these. Maybe never will.

"I'm not sure what time we have left," I venture carefully instead, afraid for how close we are now to talking of death, her death--not something Mom likes to think about much less talk about.

"You and I," Mom begins and then sobs, "you and I...what we have...here. You know, what we've been doing."

I'm crying now too, as I recognize what Mom is saying--how she wants me to acknowledge what we have been doing these past three weeks--coming home to each other, despite all the ways we've left home behind. Where is "home" for Mom? I'm beginning to think that home is where I am, where she is. It's the meaningful iteration of relationship.

Later in the afternoon, Mom and I and Lorna take a trip to the "Cascade Pea Patch" just down the street from the Mirabella on John Street. As always, the wheelchair is an impediment in the loose wood-chip paths of the community garden. I wonder to myself--what can she be thinking, as we laboriously make our way uphill through the carrots and calendula, the red leaf lettuce and the zucchini, the dinner plate dahlias and the Double Delight roses? I offer a parade of smells to her--fresh snippets of rosemary, mint, sage, lavender, alysum and calendula (note my photo montage of the fresh herbs along with elm and oak leaves turning color on Mom's red blanketed lap). Mom swallows each of these smells greedily. We are grateful to be here, grateful to be alive, despite the circumstances of Mom's stoke and dementia.

Some things are just that good--like the smokey bite of sage to our nostrils or the October sun radiating a "pea patch" and its visitors in the middle of a late afternoon in south Lake Union. So good they stick. Forever. Mom and I are this way except for the times when we forget how to get back to each other. All the ways we learn to get lost, stray from home.

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