Mama - Part Two

[For Mama of the First Part - See Everything Shifts; the World Narrows below]

My mother is now settling back into what is normal at her house, buffeted with new prescriptions - bronchitis - and a (temporary?) wave of night sitters, in addition to increased help during the day.  All of us who love her are moving back into our lives, resuming abandoned tasks (taxes come to mind), each of us elsewhere.  The too-familiar wave of heightened concern that these health crises generate has begun to - once again - dissipate.  The deeper questions were - once again - put on hold while the acute situation crested with visits and phone calls and unaccustomed rides back and forth to the hospital.  The deeper questions: Is she safe living alone? Can she dispense her own medications any more?  Underneath all this: What is our responsibility - now?


There is part of me that stands back from this scenario, arms crossed, eyes widened, and says, barely containing herself:  Are you crazy?  Of COURSE she can't live on her own anymore.  Of COURSE it isn't safe for her to mix up her own chemical cocktails.  How much more evidence do you need?


Then there is the part of me sitting quietly over on the couch, who says,   So true.  How very true. . .  And maybe we want to think about this as well:  how much of her life energy comes from being in this house where she raised her children, loved her husband, where she has walked down the same hallway for 53  years to make her coffee in the same kitchen, perhaps now a little unsteadily.  What happens if you take this away?  What is left of her sense of herself, of her history, of her value?


There is no question that her physical self would be more reliably tended.  But what about the rest of her?  Not so easy, these questions.

Not so easy.  Meanwhile, with increased attentiveness from family and hired help, we four "children" watch warily from a distance, calling more frequently, letting these questions seep into our bones, wondering if we really have the luxury of doing so, starting when the phone rings in our own homes.

Mom's 88th birthday is April 25th, not so far from now.  I wouldn't have known this life without her.  I haven't known this life without her.  My father's leaving eight years ago was an earthquake, sudden, cataclysmic.  My mother, as is more appropriate to her personality and role is going more slowly, taking her time, and ours.  My father was always in our lives in short dramatic bursts.  We leaned back into my mother, assumed my mother, absorbed my mother, grounded ourselves through her, slowly, organically, automatically.  In some ways, we still do.  As her roots into this world of form continue to dissolve, we feel a bit lost, unmoored.  Or at least, I do.

How do we navigate these unknown waters?  I don't know. Perhaps we begin by holding her hand, and each other's and listening a little more deeply, expanding into the question.