Everything shifts; the world narrows

I had been cooking something else for this blogpost, something abstract about the blogging scene in general, in and around the commercialism of private life, the gradual blurring of private and public that we are witnessing as virtual voyeurism becomes de rigeur.  (Here's the link to the article that started all this musing: www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27armstrong-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine).

But that was before the phone calls.  The two on Sunday night, four hours apart, to let me know my mother had fallen, once, then again.  Each time, gratefully, she was OK.  Each time, gratefully, the blessed neighbor was home and came over to help her get up. As these occasions initiate, there was a flurry of calls and emails involving my mother, her sainted caretaker, and my mother's four children: two men, two women.  We all live at least four hours from my mother; we all love her beyond words. We have all been dreading the day when the "what if" conversation we have repeatedly attempted would materialize as our necessary decision, a decision bound to be against her will.

We all tried to believe the superficial story, to start with:  yes, she had fallen, but she was fine really, nothing was broken. Yes, she has fallen before, in fact often, but nothing has ever broken. It will be fine. But then each of us began to absorb the rest of it.  About the chest congestion that started last Friday, about the Delsym that she added to her list of powerful prescriptions (hydrocodone, Wellbutrin, sleeping meds, etcetera) every four hours instead of twelve.  About the furnace fan that broke at 2:30 in the morning (thank goodness the caretaker decided to spend the night and could take care of it).

Her doctor, who prescribed an antibiotic on Monday, but nothing for the congestion, is the same one who didn't catch my father's congestion eight years ago, the congestion that developed into pneumonia in the hospital when he broke his hip, the pneumonia that killed him. We sibs are wary of pneumonia, wary of this doctor, this doctor to whom my mother has been loyal for decades, as she has been loyal to her house, the house she raised us in, the house she doesn't want to leave.

There are so many of us now, this community of adults who only a few decades ago would have had our parents close, in the same house, in the same neighborhood, certainly in the same town.  And we prepared for that, as many of you know: renovating space in this house to my mother's specifications, handicapped accessible, and then she refused to come, begged to be allowed to stay where she is.  I grew to have compassion for her refusal to pull up roots.

This morning as I sit here, startled each time the phone rings, wondering if I should be packing, I am struck by the sense of my mother's recent life as a cascade, the consequences of one event bearing down upon the next, growing weightier and more intransigent with each eruption, each lava flow, settling in, cooling into stone. I know that prayer can move mountains. I know that stone is sacred too.

I am aware that being healed doesn't mean the same as being cured.  I am aware that all this is but a pinprick of light in the Great Mystery, that my mind is not equipped to understand but a tiny angle, but that surrender, somehow opens it all up. And my surrendering parts are all mixed up with my fearful parts, that are all mixed up with my Pollyanna parts. And all of them want my mother to not be afraid, and not to suffer, and to be back like she was thirty years ago, laughing and walking so freely.

...And, I just received an update.  Mom and Sonja with whom we are all so blessed, her caretaker, are headed to the hospital. . .And, another phone call.  Mom refuses to go, has gone back to bed. . .

An aside, perhaps;  My laptop got congestion about the same time Mom did, is operating as if molasses had been poured into its works.  I am working on this on the desktop, the computer we bought for her, with the big screen, when she was coming here to be with us.

Everything has slowed. . .we are waiting. . .