Maternal Dementia

Employing the word decision could give one the impression that I actually did something to deliberately drive my life forward – or even to the side – during the last year. I didn’t decide much; 2010 was a year when things happened to me. I got pulled into the rushing rapids, and there were no overhanging branches to grab. I didn’t decide to say goodbye to my mother. She chose to stop treatment and enter hospice. I didn’t have to make any decisions; the rest of my life – my family and my work – just happened to accommodate my schedule so I could be with her until the end.

That was in February. What followed, all year, was a whirlwind of one thing after another: travel, work, responsibilities, challenges, burdens, changes, opportunities. Life just kept barreling on.

Never before have I been so behind. Never before have I had so many loose ends waving at me, so many unsorted piles and unattended tasks. The priority duties (for the most part) are (apparently) not overlooked, but otherwise my chin is barely above water. All those photos I mean to scan, those folders I want to clear out, the letters I want to write. That teetering stack of books is ridiculous; I really do want to read them all, but when? The New Yorker magazine arrives every week, I can’t keep up with it. Sometimes the issues stay in their plastic cover, piling up on the table where we put the mail. There’s that workshop I mean to take, the language I want to learn, the instrument I want to play again. The girls’ room is spilling over with out out-of-favor toys and books outgrown and clothes in their drawers that are now too short for them. I mean to spend an afternoon sorting and reordering and making bags of things to take to the French equivalent of the Goodwill. Next weekend.

Life hurls at me its great adventures and its mundane missions and there is all of it I want to do, to taste, to try to manage, to accomplish. I’m greedy about life; I say yes far too often. I overestimate what I can do and underestimate how long it will take. Then I curse all that eagerness when I find myself running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

This could all make me crazy, and in the past, it has.

Sometime in the last few months – I can’t say when exactly, but recently – I decided not to sweat it anymore. I decided to stop worrying about what I haven’t done and what I haven’t (yet) gotten to and to stop beating myself up for it. Remorse is romantic but not terribly productive. In the end, I’ll get to what I get to.

Even before my mother was sick, she used to worry out loud about the backroom. This was the room where she stowed, over the years, her memories, her childhood scrapbooks, college folders, love letters, trip memorabilia and the general accumulation of stuff that one acquires after fifty years in the same house. She didn’t want to burden us with the disposal of those effects. I didn’t want her to worry about this. “Leave it,” I told her, “Go do what’s interesting to you. Travel. Be with your friends. We’ll clean it out later, after you’re gone.” And we did.

If I didn’t want her to make herself crazy about getting everything in perfect order, why would I do that to myself?

This life is the full-bodied one I’ve chosen, wisely or not. Sometimes it rolls in too fast, too large, too much at once. But that’s what it is and I’ll take it. I’ll take as much of life as I can and if I don’t get to everything, if I don’t get it all done, if it doesn’t all fit in the perfect order of my imagined self, well then at least it keeps things interesting.

As for how this will play out? We’ll see.

I’m participating in Reverb10, and this post is in response to a prompt from author Susannah Conway: Wisdom. What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

Does it sound harsh to say that the moment when I felt most alive – this last year – was when my mother was about to die?

Maybe it was the contrast, life and death standing side-by-side. I’m sure that framed it. But that is not why.

During the weeks leading up to her death, I was home alone with her and very focused on the care she needed. Aside from a few moments to myself, to exercise, bathe or make a quick stop at the public library to go on-line, my days were focused on her. I helped her move around. I helped her get dressed. I made soup. I scratched her back. I answered her email. I wrote, as she dictated to me, two letters that she had wanted to write for weeks but hadn’t gotten to. I held her hand. I administered morphine, kept track of all her medications, noting the dosage, the time, the reaction. I told her stories about Short-pants and Buddy-roo.
I changed the channel. I rubbed her feet. I watched her sleep. I witnessed the end of her life. She did not have to do it alone. I accompanied her.

It’s remarkable, the singularity of purpose that comes at a time like this, when there is no question about what is priority and what is ancillary. There was no “should I do this or should I do that?” The day became a series of small moments of service. There were no distractions, no getting pulled off course because of a pretend client crisis or a drama at school. I was fully present.

When you are present like this, it is impossible not to feel alive.

I can think of other moments in my life, moments when I was present, not pulled into a future aspiration or tugged into nostalgia or remorse. The result, always: aliveness, palatable joy, delight and gratitude for my place on earth. This moment I write of, last year, rivaled those moments in its intensity and emotional alertness. The primary emotion was not joy or glee, but grief. Grief and sorrow.

But if you can step out of the judgment that insists alive must mean happy, then you can see that alive really means feeling. Feeling fully any and every emotion that washes over you and accepting it. Relinquishing control and living it and living through it, thoroughly. That is the alive moment.

Something I find curious this moment (it is not that exact moment she left us, by the way, but a moment at her bedside a few days before) is that my mother was severely hearing impaired, and the details I hold on to are almost all auditory. Silence except for a few distinct sounds: the ticking of the clock on the shelf; the furnace kicking in and vibrating the entire house, even the glassware in the cupboard; the snow-plow scraping the road as it passed in front of our house; the wind-chimes on the back porch, hanging amongst her sheets. The sound of her uneasy breathing. The sound of mine after a deep breath, taken when I realized my breathing had grown shallow. “Breathe,” I said out loud, to myself, not to her.

I knew my mother was readying herself to be no longer among the alive. I held her hand and in my heart, I could feel it hurt. It hurt so much, it hurt like my heart was being carved out of my chest with a sharp knife. I was present, all right, with the feeling, with the hurt. In pain, yes, but as alive as I’ve ever been.

I’m participating in Reverb10, and this post is in response to a prompt from author Ali Edwards: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail.

“Tell me again about the day Grammy died.” Buddy-roo had crawled into bed and was curled against me like a spoon. I was just falling back to sleep. Her words startled me out of that barely-there-light-doze.

What was it that prompted her, in that instant, to think about my mother? The picture I’ve been meaning to hang on the wall by my bed, the one of mom with a suitcase in hand on her way toward airport security – an iconic pose for her – is still tucked away on the jewelry shelf in my closet, waiting for the perfect frame to be procured. There’s nothing near my bed that would have conjured up her question. I wondered, but opted not to ask. Buddy-roo has the right to think of my mother whenever she pleases.

I repeated the story of that Sunday morning. How my mother was in a bed in her study, barely conscious for days; how her breathing had been irregular but then calmed; how I don’t remember saying this but my siblings tell me I told her the plan for the day is to let go (she was an organized woman who liked a good plan) and how we three sat with her, watching her, holding her hands, comforting her. And how during that one 45-second interval, for whatever reason – to use the bathroom, to fetch a sweater upstairs, to get some more coffee – we’d all left her unattended and she chose that blink-of-an-eye moment to stop breathing. My sister returned, discovered her and called to us.

(I think we are guilt-free about the fact that we weren’t right there at her side when she took her very last breath. We’d been there with her all weekend, in the way we were so often together as a family, in proximity but doing our own thing. None of us were surprised that she stole away while we’d been simultaneously distracted. I’d wager she was waiting for us to leave her alone so she could die in private.)

“But when did they come to get her?” Buddy-roo asked.
“Well, then we called the funeral director and he drove his big station wagon right up on the front lawn and came in to take her body away.”
“But when did they come to get her?”
“It was about an hour after she died.”
“No. When did she go?”
“Well, when she stopped breathing. I suppose that’s when she left.”

Buddy-roo deftly changed the subject, apparently satisfied enough with what she’d gleaned from my explanation. Then, as she does, she moved casually on to the next topic – a movie she wanted to watch, a breakfast request, a story from school. Conversation over.

Today my feet up in the air, against the wall, the cool-down position after a pilates session, breathing in and out as my trainer ran through a relaxation sequence. After whale-kicks with ankle-weights, ab-crunching contortions and dozens of humiliating lunge-squats, it doesn’t take much to enter a light meditation. The scene that came to me, in that state, is one that I see often in dreams about my mother. She is standing on the back porch in her summer robe as I walk from the driveway toward the house. Her body tilts slightly to one side, just like her mother’s did – just like mine will someday – and she is smiling, unconditionally happy to see me.

Then the tears came. They were good and I let them flow and my trainer understood. Later at home I told De-facto who held me while I sobbed against his chest, and he understood. Now in the quiet of my writing studio, I understand what I knew but pretended not to, how impossibly hard it is to grieve when you are busy. The recent respite from travel and work brings relief and rest, but panic as well; grief no longer compartmentalized into 10-minute cubbyholes grows heavy and damp around me.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to frame that photograph of my mother with her suitcase, the one I intend to hang by my bed. It is so her, she is on the move. I guess I learned this from her.

In my studio, on a low table just beside my desk, there is a collection of silver-framed photographs of my family: a portrait of my brother and his wife and children; my sister, sitting in front of the temple of Angkor Wat; my aunt dressed in a stunning red suit. They all smiled for the camera, which means that now they are smiling at me.

Two more photographs that stand on that table. In one, my father is barefoot at the beach. He’d been to a conference on the west coast, his first visit to the Pacific, evidently its call so enticing that he removed his socks and shoes and rolled up his suit-pants to feel the other ocean on his toes.

The other photograph is of my mother, with me. We are walking down the street with our arms around each other. It was taken during the first summer I lived in Paris, fifteen years ago when unbelievably I actually wore short baby-doll dresses with black paratrooper boots. I remember that evening, walking beside her, headed toward a favored restaurant, mother and daughter together. I was sharing my Paris with her.

Why, I wonder, have I chosen to keep and display pictures of my parents in which they are turned away from me? In both photographs, I noticed just today, they are facing the other direction, the back of their heads and their bodies the only reminder I have of them in this room otherwise filled with photographs of De-facto and my children and my family and friends – everyone else gazing straight at me.

Is it easier for me to look at them if they’re looking away?

My father, who’s been gone for over two decades, still appears in my dreams. I wake up happy, delighted for even a brief chance to visit with him in the dreamtime. My mother figures prominently in dreams these days, too, but I wake up sad, wanting more, feeling her absence. I am no stranger to grieving, I know that with time – our old friend time – the heaviness of losing her will dissipate and I’ll think of her without such a sorry weight. Someday I’ll wake up happy just to have seen her in a dream. But how long will that take?

Maybe that’s what Buddy-roo means. Maybe they haven’t come to get her yet – whoever they are, the ubiquitous they, the ones who work in tandem with time and help you let go of the people you love and hold near. When did she go, Buddy-roo? She hasn’t yet. Not until I let her go.

Once I got over the childhood fear of what might lurk in the back of my mother’s closet, it became my preferred place of refuge. When it was bath time (on her schedule but not mine) I’d go there and hide for a moment to prepare myself for the inevitable. When the Edge of Night’s twisted plot was too intense to bear, I’d crawl behind her clothes and pull myself together. If I needed to hide or think or calm myself, or suck my thumb without anyone catching me, her closet offered me comfort and privacy.

I’d leave the door ajar; a band of light across the linoleum floor shed enough light for me to see and meant I was not submerged in total darkness. I’d split the row of hanging dresses apart like thick foliage in a jungle and crawl to the back of her closet. Some of the garments were stored in dry cleaning bags, I was careful to steer clear – the fear of suffocation had been impressed upon me when it came to plastic bags – though I liked the feel of the plastic on my shoulders and sensed that the garments within those casings were her most prized, saved for the elegant occasions when other boxes from the top shelf were brought down and set out on the table, boxes with long gloves, beaded bags and silk shoes.

In the back of that closet I could be alone, but still with my mother. I could slide through that curtain of her clothing and squat in the corner and wait. I was waiting for courage, waiting for affection or just waiting until boredom took over – but while I was there waiting, the scent of my mother surrounded me. I was at home among her lightly perfumed clothes and the mildly stale but not unpleasant smell of her shoes. All the things in this closet were hers: the things I saw her wearing and carrying were stored in this private place, it was her domain but it was mine too, for different reasons. It was where I could return to a silent and simple union with her. I could be embraced by her here, by all her things, even if she was somewhere else.

Last winter I was at home to help my mother for about a week before my siblings joined me to say our goodbyes to her. Each day, the rapid decline of her physical capacity required more from me. I could barely find a moment to dress and brush my teeth between the tasks required to assist her; a nearly constant observation became necessary at the end. One day I felt close to some edge – the edge of exhaustion from caretaking a dying woman; the edge of grief, preparing to lose someone I loved too much; the edge of longing, being too far and too long away from De-facto and the girls. So when my mother drifted into an afternoon nap, I found myself drawn to her closet. I ran my hands across the shoulders of her hanging dresses and blouses. I burrowed through and behind her clothes to the corner of the closet, just like I used to, and with my back against the wall, slid down to sit on the floor, letting the plastic dry cleaning bags brush against me (no longer afraid of suffocation) and permitted myself a short regression to everything that this closet meant to me, to a time when everyone around me was older and larger and their major preoccupation – at least in my view – was to take care of me.

I sat there in the back of that closet for only a few moments, my long limbs fit in that corner less comfortably than they did 40-some years ago. But it was long enough to remember what it was like to feel safe and protected, long enough to let tears spill and let go the mounting pressure, long enough to long for the security that something as simple as a mother’s closet could provide.

* * *

My sister and I just spent a week together at my mother’s house to continue the process of emptying it of her personal effects. We have purposely not rushed this process, knowing that grief takes its time and we should too. Yet we know better than to lose momentum, so each month my brother, sister or I (or some combination) travel to the house and endeavor to empty a few more boxes, to give away and throw away a few more things, to prepare the house to be shown to prospective buyers and ultimately to be sold.

The focus of last week’s trip was rather specific: the closets. I had partly to clear out the paraphernalia of my own past. I’d left in her care shoe-boxes filled with letters to friends from summer camp, high school and college folders, and several stuffed animals about to lose their stuffing. But the real task was to address my mother’s wardrobe. For six months we had left her things hanging, but now was the time. My sister and I stood side-by-side in my mother’s closet, touching each and every article of clothing, recalling the occasion when she wore this suit or that sweater-set, remembering how she’d had this skirt made from silk she bought on that trip with the two of us. Once in a while we were even a little surprised at what we found (wow, she owned a leather jacket?) but mostly we were reminded of her good taste and how careful she was to take care of her beautiful garments.

“What are your tears like these days?” said the woman who we’d been told to call to come and take away my mother’s clothing. How naturally she broached the subject, knowing that tears can vary in nature and degree over time. She did not insult us by tiptoeing around our grief. This made it easy to trust her. She gently directed us to attend to other tasks in other rooms while she set about quietly emptying the contents of all my mother’s closets. We did not have to watch her pulling out the hangers and folding our mother’s clothes into black plastic bags. We did not have to help her remove these items that we treasured too much, that held in their fabric too many precious memories. Her discretion was a delicate gift. She was like an angel sweeping in to do the hardest job, and somehow finding a way to take tender care of us while doing it.

After she left, I stood at the door of the closet, emptied of its contents. The shelves were bare. Only a few stray hangers remained. The row of hanging garments that once buffered me from the rest of the world had been dismantled. I stepped in and closed the door behind me, leaving it ajar to let in the familiar strip of light. I swear I could still smell my mother in that closet: the faint hint of Shalimar, the familiar scent of her worn shoes. Was that for real, or just in my memory? Does it matter? As we give away the things that were hers, we commit them to our memory. And our memory of her is something that we’ll always get to keep.

On Sunday, my children saw me for the first time in ten days. They ran to me with that amped-up fondness that the heart manufactures during a long absence. Into my arms they flung themselves and I received them with equal exuberance, only I held on a little too tight, a little too long, a little too fierce. Quickly they were wriggling to free themselves.

“Happy French Mother’s Day!” They sang this out in unison, prompted, I’m pretty sure, by De-facto who, having made very little of the American Mother’s Day earlier in the month, hoped to make good. Last week’s school art projects helped the cause: Buddy-roo proudly handed over a large blue envelope she’d made that read bonne fête maman! Inside, a picture of a flowerpot covered with sparkles, and a poem, copied meticulously, no doubt, at the behest of the teacher after she wrote it in perfect penmanship on the chalkboard.

Short-pants had crafted, in her class, a small box out of construction paper. Inside it there were tiny notes with micro-messages, mots doux as she called them. “Maman, mon coeur,” or “I love you night and day.” Sweet words, indeed, scratched out in her familiar pen. These hand-made gifts so precious, so heart-felt and so tear-inducing. Damn it.

“Why are you crying?” Buddy-roo asked. Before I could answer, Short-pants chimed in. “Because she’s happy and sad at the same time. Right maman?”

I guess I’ve said that before.

These days tears are everywhere. They reside barely below the surface, wherever I turn. A group of scientists discuss new ways of visualizing biology in order to better understand it, and I’m a little choked up. Thirty strangers sing happy birthday to me, I press the tears down. A liberated Alice returns from the Underland at the end of an in-flight movie and I’m hunting for Kleenex. My Pilates trainer urges me forward in grueling sets of 8 and 12, I’m concentrating to hold the tears in, at least until the workout is over and I’m on the stairs outside.

A taxi drove me to attend a meeting yesterday at an address that I, too, was unsure of. I was dropped at the wrong building, which – no surprise – put me on the brink of tears. Hold it together, I counseled myself. Running mascara has very little professional merit. The receptionist assured me it was only a ten-minute walk to the other #163 Quai-de-Whatever, where I wanted to be. So I walked. On the way, a man dressed in white painted an iron fence a shade even whiter. Does he still have a mother, I wondered, and does he think of her often? A hundred meters later, under a trestle, I passed a hooker wearing short black shorts and an ankle-length black leather coat that flew open behind her with every step of her stride. She smelled of liquor and hair spray as she went by. How about her mother?

Everybody had a mother, at some point. Every time I look at anyone I pass, I wonder, do they still?

Thoughts rush by on a train of remorse. Why didn’t I spend more time with her this last year? My week-long visits every-other month were a stretch to make happen at the time; they seem pathetic in retrospect. Now that my mother is gone, now that I can’t ever visit her again, isn’t it ludicrous that I didn’t go every month? Or that I didn’t just move in?

I run through the last week of her life, a string of images are frozen in my mind: watching her dress herself slowly and carefully, laughing because it was taking so long. How she sipped her special juice drinks with a straw, but elegantly. As she weakened, how she would regard herself in the mirror, as if she did not recognize the not-well person she had become. This image is especially strong because I, too, was in it, off to the side, watching myself watching her talk to her own reflection. “I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered. “Neither do I,” I’d said, unable to contain the tears. But she didn’t cry about it. Ever. At least not in front of me.

This morning my daughters’ longer-and-lankier-than-ever bodies were nearly impossible to stir, their jet lag, now a week old, as fierce as mine is after just returning a day ago. Buddy-roo grumbled and stretched and turned to the side, “scratch my back.” I caressed her, urging her, gently and then more rigorously, to wake up and rally for the day. I went to rouse Short-pants, who sweats in her sleep. I pulled the comforter off her shoulder and swept the damp hair off her forehead. Her sleep was deep, but when she saw it was me, she jerked her arm from under the covers and wrapped it around my neck, pulling my head right up to hers. It was a strong, firm grip, very deliberate.

“You can take your time letting go,” I told her. So she drew me in closer, even tighter.

Tears. Again. My emotions spilling out like an overfilled tank. Or to draw a truly sad and timely analogy, like an oil spill. No small trickling here. Rather a fountain of feelings gushing out because of some sloppy fissure; messy, embarrassing, uncontainable, washing up on the shore for everyone to see.
I have an odd and eccentric empathy for those BP engineers. Some spills are not so easily contained.

My hands are dry, parched from the handling of paper and the folding of cardboard box covers. My mind reels at the level of organization hidden within the disorganized mess of boxes and files stowed away, every box like another chapter of her life, the files of all her correspondence, drafts of her speeches, even all her travel receipts. My heart breaks, reading love letters my parents wrote to each other in college, his familiar scribble, eighteen times in a row writing out “I love you.” Or finding a letter my mother’s father left for my grandmother in an envelope that read: “to be opened only in the event of my death.” In it, his humble words of reflection on their life together and the tasks she would have ahead of her to continue without him.

There is a physical, mental and emotional labor involved in cleaning out my mother’s house, but especially so as we addressed the backroom, the room that waited behind a closed door, the room where our family’s stories have been stored for so many years. It is not a small room; it probably measures 15 X 20 feet. It was packed to the gills with files and crates of papers and memorabilia, magazines, empty boxes that were re-used every Christmas and board games we no longer played, old carpet remnants, photo albums, family scrapbooks. It must be said that you couldn’t really walk into the room except for the thin path to the blue recycling bins, kept just next to the 50-year-old standing freezer which contains jars of something that might have put there more than thirty years ago. We have yet to defrost it; that thaw is for another trip, I think.

She saved everything. A long box with our baby books, faded with time and love, and underneath them, all the tiny, corny, welcoming cards sent to her when each one of us was born. Every grade school portrait and class photo. Every single report card. The piece of paper that was pinned on my brother’s shirt so he would be shuffled off the school bus to the correct first-grade class (the pin still attached). All our schoolwork – I think she saved every piece of paper that came home, all of it stowed in reddish brown legal brief envelopes tied up tight and stacked in a cupboard in the backroom.

My sister and I would call out to each other, “Oh my god, come see this.” A carton with her budget records from the 1970s and envelopes filled with tax receipts from the same decade; a notebook in which she kept a record of every dinner party she hosted in 1967-1968, who was invited, what she served, how they were seated at the tables (and shifted for dessert), and all the thank you notes she received after each occasion; the diaries she kept in college, filled with the practical details of her day (“up at 7…”) but also an occasional reference to someone she had a crush on who smiled at her in a special way; scrapbooks from her youth in Havana, with theater programs and letters from her school and small calling cards bearing her maiden name; a large box, and then another, with all the condolence notes she received when my father died, and the record of how she acknowledged of each and every card.

One of the sagging cardboard cartons contained every letter I ever sent home from college. In the same box, a notebook with the letters written during my semester abroad in Denmark. I remember where I was sitting when I wrote most of them, at a square wooden table at the Café Peder Hvitfeldts in the center of Copenhagen, a Carlsberg Porter to my left to fortify me. It was stunning to see all these letters again, collected together. I drew my finger down the lines of little words, my fine, tiny writing filling every blank space of the page and it all rushed back to me: being a 20-year old stretching my legs to another continent. How strange and exotic it all felt, compared to life in my rural hometown, or even the small city that hosted my university. I was tasting Europe for the first time and it was thrilling. I remember writing home with all the details – some of it more than my parents ever needed to know – because I felt compelled to convey to them how I was getting it all, doing it all, growing into the woman that I imagined they hoped I would become.

The letters are painful to re-read, quite honestly, as now with some years under my belt I can see in them the naïveté and the obnoxious optimism I possessed. They are trying too hard to express something that I realize now I never needed to write because my parents knew it all along: mom, dad, I’m doing you proud, which somehow seemed so important then, and well, still is now.

Standing over this pile of letters, I realized it’s not just about grieving her death. Or my father’s. Or even preparing for the grieving of the loss of this old house – which when we sell it will be like saying goodbye to another family member, a friend that has hugged our family close for 53 years. Each time I open one of those crumbling boxes filled with the dust and dead cluster flies and the memorabilia of my earlier days, I am grieving a part of me, too, some part that was young and impressionable and looking to my mother for help and advice and approval and that just as my mother is gone,
so is that little girl. I wouldn’t mind to still be her, and just let someone collect my report cards while I run out to the orchard to play. But I have my own collecting to do, while my little girls run about and skip away.

Maybe nobody likes to admit to this, but I will: We mourn our grandparents and our parents and we miss them and their goodness and their guidance but we are also mourning ourselves and our own inevitable passage to the stage of life they were in before they died, which signals our own departure, too.

As my mother dies, so do the impish girl and the rebellious teenager and the emerging young woman that I used to be. As long as she was here, these parts of me lived in relation to her. Now that she is gone, I feel as though I’m on the threshold of another place in my life: it is papered with wisdom and prudence, furnished with a bit of grace, a shrug of humility. It is a place that she inhabited so effortlessly and left it in such lovely condition for me to step into – probably because she had that back room to store everything else.

After the reading of the 23rd Psalm, not even five minutes into my mother’s memorial service, Buddy-roo tapped my arm. “This is not so interesting to me,” she said. There was still an hour to go in the service, and we were in the front row. “But can you stick it out?” I whispered. “For Grammy?”

She wriggled around to put her head on De-facto‘s lap. “If you scratch my back,” she sighed, handing me a Fisher Price motorcycle with a tiny person, borrowed from my childhood toy stash, “with this.”

I drove the tiny vehicle up and down her back – along her legs when she motioned for me to do so – happy to be caressing her. I can’t say I didn’t appreciate her restlessness, but this was one of those times I really needed to keep it at bay. Please Buddy-roo, I prayed, hang in there.

The chapel was packed. The count – we learned later – was at least 300 people. My mother was a woman engaged in life and in service; the communities she engaged with and served turned out. Beyond her extended family, who flew or drove in from points all over the east coast, a throng of friends from every part of her life came to remember and celebrate her.

When she was a bit younger than I am now, my mother lost part of her hearing. She never let it stop her, and as a result became an advocate for people with hearing loss. She wrote books and gave speeches, served on boards. She was even involved in drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. My mother had instructed us to arrange for an audio induction loop; people in the designated pews could set their hearing aides to pick up the transmission and hear every speaker in the service. We also invited a sign language interpreter, a long, elegant woman who brought every speakers words to life with her agile hands and her expressive face. Short-pants, whom my mother had taught to finger spell, was riveted. Buddy-roo wanted to know who that woman on the other side of the stage was waving at. The signing – it’s such a beautiful language – managed to hold her attention, too.

Buddy-roo pointed to my name in the printed program. “Why are you in there?” I whispered back that I was going to speak. Her eyes widened; the expression on her face reflected the nerves brewing in my gut. My father, a natural public speaker, used to say that if you weren’t at least a little nervous before giving a speech, then you didn’t respect your audience. Either that or you were afraid of crying uncontrollably in front of a large crowd. Buddy-roo pointed to the lectern. “You’re going to go up there?” I nodded. (Maybe now it was getting interesting?)

Each remembrance of my mother was tear-provoking or pride-inducing, or both. After her friends and colleagues lauded her, and my brother and sister delivered such poignant words, I wondered why I ever thought it was a good idea to speak, and regretted putting myself after almost everyone, near the end program. I made it through my speech without any serious faltering, but let the floodgates go after I’d returned to my seat, during the eulogy. Short-pants squeezed my hand. Buddy-roo decided she should cry, too, just to keep me in good company.

Now that all the busy-ness of the preparations and organization of the service are behind me, and the relief of it being over is satisfying and settling. There is a sense of being finished with something important. But just as things end, others begin – the completion of this event only means that something else is starting. I am vaguely nervous about this: there is now room for the feelings I couldn’t afford to feel up until now. I woke up at 4:30 am this morning, part jet-lag, part emotional turmoil. I’m restless as hell and on the verge of tears.

As for Ex-facto, we exchanged a few good-luck text messages over the weekend. I ran into his niece at my favorite hometown pub, and he stopped by to visit us on his way out of town on Sunday. De-facto instantly befriended his youngest son, who’s the same age as Short-pants, teaching him how to knock croquet balls around the back yard, and running with him through the apple orchard beside the house.

When my mother’s memorial service was finished, our family was escorted out of the front pews and down the center aisle and out of the chapel. Buddy-roo, after sitting still for more than an hour, sprinted out of the row. She skipped in wide dancing steps from side to side, prancing all the way down the aisle. I walked behind her, in the shadow of her joy, getting the quickest glimpse of the next generation preparing to take charge.

…will abolish just what’s bothering you, as the song goes. Never mind that it’s a song about shoe polish. My guess is nail polish has the same uplifting capacity. Much like my aunt who proselytizes the restorative power of a good hair wash, I’m a believer that a pedicure is sometimes all you need to set things right. A good soaking of the feet, scraping away the dead skin, trimming of cuticles and cutting/filing the nails and then the deep red or sweet rose or mysterious vamp that reminds you every time you look down that you’re the kind of woman who makes the time to care for your feet.

Before I went home to take care of my ailing mother, a friend told me to take a picture of her hands and feet. “Because years later,” she said, “I couldn’t remember what my mother’s hands looked like.” It’s not so silly, except I can’t imagine forgetting this detail. My father’s well-manicured hands with his long and elegant fingers are something I can picture exactly now, as though I’d held them yesterday.

You all must be so tired of hearing about my dead mother. But I don’t know what else to write about. Everything seems banal compared to what I have been through these last weeks. I’m still losing my mind. The kids have made a train wreck out of my life. De-facto’s a prince, or then he’s not a prince. Short-pants is angelic and Buddy-roo is impish. It’s the same as it always was. Except it’s not the same.

I know this is a question of time. I still miss my father, but the constant ache and daily despair about his death no longer plagues me, though the occasional sting of wishing he was here when something important happens has not lost its venom, even after more than 20 years.

I try to do normal things. I stop to buy a baguette. “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you,” says the baker’s wife. I tell her I’ve been away a lot. The way you say this in French is “J’avais beaucoup de deplacements.” Yes, I’m feeling very displaced, I think to myself in the pseudo-language of Franglais, a butchering of both French and English versions of a similar-but-not-quite-the-same words. Another good example: déranger, a disturbing verb in both languages, but more often used as an adjective in English. Sometimes in my head – or even out loud, to like-minded friends – I mumble, “I hope I’m not deranging you.” It’s a funny little language we expats use to effect a hint of sarcasm.

“And it was good, all your traveling?” she asks.

I want to tell this friendly, familiar local baker-woman that I’ve been gone because I went to help my mother die. It feels like I should tell her, she knows me well enough to notice I’ve been gone. It feels like she might care, but that doesn’t mean she will or that she should. Just because I am so tender doesn’t mean I should blurt it out and then have to continue the conversation, the answering of questions, the prolonged explanation to a kind stranger who has no context.

“Yes,” I say, “it was all good.” I don’t want to derange her with my grief.

Keep doing normal things. I make soup. Except it makes me think of those soups I used to make for my mother the last nights before she decided to stop eating. I do laundry. Except folding the sheets makes me think of her. Hanging the little socks on the drying rack in my living room makes me think of the only time she wrote something other than praise after reading one of blog posts, the one about our decision not to buy a new dryer when ours broke down. “You’re a busy working mother with two children,” she wrote, “so buy yourself a dryer.”

I miss seeing her name on emails in my box. I’ve actually left one of her last messages in my Gmail account, and occasionally I mark it as unread, so I can read it again, like it was new, like she just sent it. I know this is pathetic.

I get my haircut. I remember getting a trim the day before the last time I went to see her, how I cried through the entire appointment. I go to the aesthetician to get a bikini wax. This doesn’t remind me of my mother at all but it hurts so much and I’m so spent that I cry anyway. “Does it hurt that much?” she says, kneading the ball of caramel in her hand. “Yes. It hurts that much.”

Raquel, the Brazilian manicurist/pedicurist who comes to my home to attend to my nails arrives late as usual, so this feels a little normal. She massages my feet. This reminds me of seeing my mother’s face settling into a feline smile as I pressed my thumbs into the balls of her feet, massaging them for her before she went to sleep. Don’t go there, I tell myself. Don’t make everything a signifier for something sad, something lost, something about her.

While my feet are soaking in warm soapy water and my hands are drinking in the mystery treatment provided by her special magical coated plastic gloves, Raquel turns to Short-pants and Buddy-roo and says, “Who’s first?” They won’t let me near them with a nail-clipper or emery board in my hand, but they race to her. She is the Pedicure-Whisperer, the intuitive tender of nails, calming any child, even my two wild fillies, enough to cut and clean their fingers and toes. Buddy-roo chooses a dainty, unsurprising, princess pink; it’s Short-pants who startles me by pointing to a dark, vampy burgundy, close to my own preferred color. Raquel glances up at me, her eyes seeking permission. Why not? I shrug. She’s not the daughter I worry about taking this color to heart.

Later, as the varnish on my toes is drying, the girls arrive with their dolls, asking if they can paint their toenails, too. My first instinct is no. They’ll make a mess. They’ll ruin the dolls. “Sure,” I say, remembering that nail polish remover has already been invented. “But get our polish from the basket in our bathroom.”

There is jumping and cheering and running back and forth and setting up the dolls in small child-sized chairs. Raquel offers a few tips to the girls as their shaky hands struggle to paint the polish on the tiniest of doll nails. They do a surprisingly accurate job, and parade proudly around the living room displaying the polished extremities of their dolled-up dolls.

“Careful,” I warn them, “Keep them away from the couch.” (I can’t help myself.)

“We know, mama,” Short-pants says, “don’t worry.”

They march and laugh and celebrate (with aplomb) a splash of color on tiny toenails. They sing a song about nail polish, one they’ve made up on the spot. For the first time in a long time, things seem almost normal. This, I suppose, is how life goes on.

We climbed the four flights of stairs to the olive green door of our apartment. Short-pants was ahead of me. She stopped at the landing, just before the door, and turned toward me. “Grammy’s happy now,” she said, “It’s just the rest of us who are sad, the ones left behind.” The edge of her mouth spread into a wide-open smile, her oversized chalky teeth in full view. She beamed awkward and proud at once, fully aware that she could console me with her wisdom. Where does she come up with these things? As if she could read my mind, she went on, “I read that in my Molly McIntire book, but it makes sense.”

Funny what our mourning minds construct to soften the blow of our loss. She’s happy now, we say. Is she? Happy lying in a polished box under the frozen soil? My mother, a card-carrying member of Republicans for Choice, now buried a mere stone’s throw away from a newly placed memorial that I’d never seen before, a marker engraved with prayers for the lives of unborn children “in hopes that our nation will stop the abortion that kills them.” Is she happy about that?

She’s with Daddy now. Is she? Although my last post was engineered around this idea, I have no evidence to prove it. He’s been dead for 23 years. Did he wait for her in some celestial green room with a monitor, watching the rest of her life before she came to join him? What if he reincarnated? What if right now he’s some pimply teenager fumbling his way to second base in his parents’ suburban basement?

I suppose this is would be the anger that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross referred to in her five stages of grief. Anger being the stage that follows denial, which is what I guess I was doing for the last year because my mother didn’t look or act like somebody with a terminal illness. My anger rises from the dust and residue of all the clichéd things we say about a good death, and how she didn’t suffer and how her family was with her, and she died on her own terms.

They weren’t my terms.

I wanted to be able to ask her advice about how to manage my girls when they are rotten and unruly teenagers. She had some experience in this domain, having survived my adolescence. I wanted my mother to watch my daughters grow into young women, to see them graduate from college. I wanted her to be around. I wasn’t done yet.

I keep wondering what do I have to do to wake up and be in a different reality where she’s still with us. Is that bargaining? Check the box for the Kübler-Ross’s third stage, too.

Right away, Buddy-roo noticed the ring on my right-hand ring-finger, a narrow gold band with two rectangular blue amethysts set with two miniature diamonds. I told her how my mother bought the ring from a jeweler in the Russian market in Phnom Penh. My sister was living in Southeast Asia at the time – hard to believe it was 10 years ago – and organized for us a Christmas trip to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It was a trip filled with indelible images: two sisters sunbathing on an island beach on Koh Samui; my mother, tired and proud after climbing the steep and treacherous stairs to the very top tower of the Temple of Angkor Wat; we three lined up in a row, each in our own single-seated cyclo, complete with toothless drivers and the backdrop of Hanoi’s chaotic traffic.

The jeweler – his name was Sarat, my sister’s most favored vendor in the market – was charmed by my mother, like everyone we introduced her to.
He spent nearly an hour showing her all the rings he’d designed, telling her about his gems and precious stones and where he found them in Cambodia. I remember how, after my mother went to bed, my sister and I would sit at the hotel bar and shake our heads. Everyone was always so enamored with mom. If they only knew what we knew, we’d mutter to each other, knowing that what we knew was a daughter’s privilege, and that despite all her motherly flaws, we, too, admired her fiercely.

Buddy-roo wanted to try on the ring. I twisted it off my finger and handed it over. She held the band, turning it back and forth to make the stones sparkle under the light. It was too large for her ring finger, even too big as she pulled it down over her thumb. “Can I have it someday?” she asked. “Sure,” I told her, “someday you can have it all.”

I’m haunted by that someday, that future moment when I will leave Short-pants and Buddy-roo to their grief, when they will rifle through my earliest love letters to
De-facto, making fun of my copiously worded and disclaimer-ridden proclamations of affection, or when they read the letters in that shoe-box that I should probably destroy now while I can, the syrupy ones I wrote to my parents when I was an introspective, awe-struck student seeing Europe for the first time. Or when they go to write my obituary and realize that I used to be somebody, somebody who was a competent professional before becoming their quirky, forgetful, imperfect mother.

As I begin to sort through the relics that belonged to my mother, I see her anew. I study her photographs a different way. A college friend of hers writes a note about some mischief they stirred up on campus; I am surprised to think of my mother involved in such antics. Now comes a new view, I suppose, to see her as someone beyond my mother, to frame her in larger context, as a woman coming of age and living a range of life experiences. A regular person – just like me.

It makes me look at the girls and think this: by the time you can possibly understand who I really am, it will probably be too late to know me. Then you, too, will know this hollow, cheated, bereaved anger.

This isn’t a pretty post. It’s agitated and discomforting. It doesn’t resolve and tie up in a pithy bow at the end. You were a bit too whiney in that one, someone will say, after reading it. Why, I wonder, when a woman speaks the truth about anger or frustration, this is called whining. Were I man, I’d be allowed to punch holes in the plaster wall. Which is what my words are meant to do right now, because I have been on an airplane all night and I am tired and honest and angry that my mother has been taken from us.

Everything else I’ve written about her death has been well-behaved. Why can’t the poignant be joined by the raw and unrefined? I want to write it as it is: real, rough, full-bodied grief, something that’s messy, mad and just a little bit selfish, something that will be diluted if there are too many drafts and edits, something that’s ugly and maybe hard to read. Something that screams at me to just press publish.