Tending to Endings (forty-three)
This week I’m including a short passage from the book I’ve been working on these past two years. It explores many of the themes I’ve written about it Tending to Endings, but from a perspective closer to the experience, before I knew all that would happen with my mom.
Readers occasionally ask for more about living with Alzheimer’s, and so I chose this excerpt from November 2018, a few weeks after I went to stay with my parents (near Chicago) and a few weeks before we learned the cancer had returned. Mom was also receiving daily treatments in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber for pain associated with radiation wounds from her previous cancer treatment.
Excerpted from “Chamber,” Band of Brightness
My dad has written “Laura’s Birthday” on the whiteboard we keep on the kitchen counter to help my mom know what is happening each day. He has drawn balloons and a smiley face along with the two other agenda items: Oxygen Therapy and Sandy and Bill bring dinner.
“It’s Laura’s birthday,” mom says when she stands over the counter staring at the whiteboard. By her tone, I know she is taking in this information.
“Happy Birthday,” she says because she still knows what to say. In one of the books I read about Alzheimer’s, I learned that social skills are often strong even after memory and other communication skills fail because they are habit. My mom has always been very good with social skills. She is from the Midwest. Also, she knows a smile can connect people and it is important to her to make people feel welcome and liked. She has practiced a lifetime at smiling at children and homeless people and new mothers and the old woman on the bus. She still does this now that she is that old woman.
Even with her broad smile, I can see questions in her gray-blue eyes. How old? Are we doing anything special today? Did I get you a present? Are you my child? I can feel my mother’s anxiety because I am her daughter and, also, I am practiced at fear. I wonder how to reassure her.
We are careful to not ask her questions because then she feels put on the spot. But it is hard to know how to bridge the gulf between us. She is so very aware of condescension. It feels wrong to assume she doesn’t know things and just ramble on all the answers for questions she hasn’t asked. Also, she can only process so much information at once, so giving her a long stream of facts can overwhelm her.
I say, “Thank you for giving birth to me, Mom. Thank you for taking such good care of me while I was a baby and ever since, for fifty-four years now!”
“Wow, fifty-four,” she says. “How did that happen?”
It is my birthday and I am here in the town where I grew up with my mother and my father who brought me into this world, a place I left at age 19 in 1984. Amy, my youngest sister, takes me out to lunch. My sister Sandy, two years younger, brings Szechwan shrimp for dinner. Friends from Boise send texts and cards in the mail. My dad assures my mom that they gave me my birthday check. I preorder Michelle Obama’s as a present to myself. Becoming.
This birthday more than anything else, I think about the vulnerability of being born. We don’t choose it. We just become. And at first, we are not able to do a damn thing to take care of ourselves. I remember watching my sons just after they were born and thinking— they cannot pull the blanket up if they are cold because even their arms are not yet under their control. Their need was so great it made me ache for them and love them more than my own heart.
There was a swath of time in my early adulthood that I took issue with my mom for not being as nurturing as I would’ve liked or in the ways I preferred. I was an emotional daughter and we had different ways of coping with emotion.
But today all I can think of is how much she loved me and how dependent I was on that love. It’s not the work of mothering or the pain of childbirth that awes me, it is the devotion. During that time when I could not live without care, my mother made sure I got from one hour to the next, first in her womb and then here on earth. Of course that is enough. That is everything.
Before dinner, I brave the early winter and cross the parking lot for the 4:30 hot yoga class. I stand on my mat in the heated room with other yogis and feel this body —this fifty-four-year-old body—that still moves that still breathes that still works pretty well. Yes, there is a pain in my sacroiliac joint that makes backbends difficult. But I am here, connected to earth, breathing.
At some point, the only logical response to birthdays is gratitude. I have lost friends my own age. My own mother is leaving or shedding her own self or some other process I do not understand, a little every day. The opposite of becoming.
I am here. I can do sun salutations and humble warrior and, on a good day, standing bow. I can relax into pigeon pose and feel those hips that have birthed twins open and stretch. I can breathe through savasana and sense my connection to the other yogis in the room and my sisters and my children and the tree outside the studio and the trail outside my writing room all the way in Idaho. I can sense my connection to my mom, the woman who carried this body into this world.
Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. Next week I will be posting something about legacies. If you would like to subscribe so you don’t miss these weekly posts, please leave your name and email below.