Grappling with Edges
Grappling with Edges
I sit at the white marble counter on the white stool in my mother’s white kitchen. She sleeps, her first nap of the day. I will wake her in a few moments to help her get ready for her one o’clock doctor’s appointment.
She is such a tiny thing. Always a force of nature, in the best and worst sense, she now takes up less space in all ways. She survived the Holocaust, three years in the Lodz Ghetto and time in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and not surprisingly, carries sharp, broken edges. The toughest of women, always ready to fight, there has often been a storm around her, a mixture of love and anger and fear that can stir even the calmest of waters into a frothing boil. The storm still rages, but the winds are weakened. It is hard to witness. This morning as we made her oatmeal she said, “I thought I’d go out fast with a heart attack.”
“Yes, that’s what we all want, I guess. It’s tough, moving toward the end of life,” I offered.
“I’m crawling toward it,” she said.
The metaphor is apt. She is moving in increments toward her death. Without her daughters, she would not still be in her own home. Without her daughters, perhaps not even still alive. Now dependent on us as we once were on her, this part of the story is not unusual.
I come to the non-party late. Living over a thousand miles away gives me space, which sometimes saves me and sometimes creates difficulty. My heart breaks with the witnessing of her extreme discomfort, weakness and exhaustion. Her strength has ebbed since my last visit, not long ago. Yet part of me still wants to run. When I am here, I feel I should abandon my own life, completely. Pay my dues for living far away and not being part of the daily care crew. I get that, and yet in the midst of her crumbling life, I long for my own. I long for space and stillness and time to process. I long for a bed that doesn’t cause sciatica. I long for air not kept at a too warm temperature, air that doesn’t stifle and suffocate. The house holds the toxic energy of her years of anger and need and intense love. Even as I feel compassion and heartache for her suffering, I dream of escape to healthier climes.
I do escape, temporarily, driving away for two nights to my sanctuary, the house on the coast I have had since the seventies. As I drive through the mountains, I listen to an NPR story about the shift in treatment of primates used for research. For decades they were taken at about the age of two or three from large groups of primates at breeding centers to research facilities and put in cages by themselves. Today there is a trend to keep them in pairs. These highly social animals, one of the caretakers explains, when isolated become so lonely that they go crazy. She says they tear at their skin creating large gashes and rip their hair out to the point of baldness. When they keep them in pairs, this behavior stops, but thousands of chimps remain isolated in facilities, with scientists worried that their research will be compromised by the pairing.
The sun breaks through the clouds as I come around a tight curve. God light streaks through the trees and fog, making it hard to see. I pull over to the side of the road, sit in my rented Toyota and sob, absorbing the beauty of the gold and scarlet leaves punctuated by the deep dusky greens of the fir, hemlock and pine. The swirling light and fog of this late autumn afternoon somehow cradle and accentuate the pain of all those primates, the suffering of my mother.
I arrive and haul all my stuff from the car. I bought way too much food for a very short visit. I packed too many clothes. It takes several trips to lug it all into the house. A few minutes later my cell chimes and my daughter, Kelsey, tells me she is glad I am here, this day of all days. And then I remember. It is October 17th, the death anniversary of Michael, her father and my first husband. The perfect place to spend this evening by myself, this house that he purchased right out of college and that holds so many memories of him and of our falling from friendship to love and of the three of us as a family. I am brought to tears again and also shamed by my nearly missing the importance of the day. It has been 28 years since he died but I realize that my body, with its tears and sighs, remembered the date even though my brain was distracted.
I place his photo on my makeshift shrine of agates, shells and candles, pour a glass of port from the bottle I find on the counter, toast him, and then carry the refilled glass to our beach to witness the sunset. When I return to the house, the darkness is nearly complete. I turn on lights, eat a simple dinner and then call my husband. He tells me he is eating pie and I think, that’s nice, but it is not until I mention the death anniversary that he wonders at the timing of the pie, a gift of appreciation from Kelsey. The fact that she did this for him, her stepfather, on the anniversary of the death of her father, brings me to tears yet again. I cannot speak for a moment. This time gratitude flows with the sadness. Beauty and pain fold together like origami, sharp edges creating something new.