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| Ozark cabin camping: Mom is younger here than my oldest son is now. |
Mom seems to be rallying right now. Suddenly, in the past couple of days, she has a voracious appetite. My mother has three of her own teeth left, all of them sweet, and she won’t wear her ill-fitting dentures anymore. I’ve told her she’s on the “whatever you want” diet, so she’s only eating tapioca, sherbet, Jell-O, sherbet, butterscotch pudding, and sherbet (a huge bowl of rainbow sherbet, drizzled and softened with orange juice, must end every meal – all between-meal snacks are bowls of sherbet). And my daughter just brought us her partner’s garlic mashed potatoes and her Swiss chocolate cupcakes with cheesecake mousse, so guess who else is on the “whatever you want” diet?
Mom seems stronger right now, too. She’s fallen quite a few times in the past year, so we attached a portable doorbell ringer to her walker, put the receiver in the living room, and she’s supposed to ring the bell whenever she wants to get up. She’s not supposed to go anywhere without ringing the bell. But yesterday morning, at 2:45 a.m., I woke to canaries chirping because all the kitchen lights were on. I snuck off the sofa and found Mom in the kitchen, peering into the freezer, on the hunt for sherbet I’m guessing. No walker nearby. Then at 5 a.m., same thing: All lights on, canaries going to town, Mom in the bathroom. No walker. She’s been getting herself up and back to bed without my help (or knowledge probably, sometimes). Part of me is already planning for an elaborate bed alarm system. Part of me wants to cheer her on.
Then, at breakfast, a fleeting reminder that all is not well: She asked me who all the little girls running around the house were, and whether or not I was ever planning to tell her the truth, that they were in trouble with Joe Cook (I don’t know anyone with this name).
I guess my point in all this is that dying isn’t an either/or, white/black, or a steady, predictable decline. There’s no line graph for this trajectory. It’s a jagged rollercoaster of rallies and relapses. It’s good nights, with 4-hour stretches of glorious sleep, and bad nights of being up every hour. It’s Mom rising to the surface to recall hilarious moments from our camping trip to the Ozarks in 1979, then drifting into the ether where little girls and men named Joe Cook float around.
This terrifying, fascinating process of dying, it seems, is giving me the ultimate practice at “going with the flow.” I have to be here now, where expectations regularly go up in sleepless smoke, where Mom and I crack up together in unexpected moments of joy, and where all we can really count on is the present moment.
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Thank you, Marcella, for sharing about your mom’s and your journey. I really need it right now.
ReplyDeleteHi Marcella,
ReplyDeleteOur mutual friend Ina introduced me to your blog, and I am gratefully passing the connection along to my friend Alison--a virtual sisterhood of daughters.
I just returned Saturday to British Columbia after 2 weeks in Vermillion. I had braved travelling through Christmas weather and pandemic to get there because my sister had given me the heads up that our mother seemed to be moving quickly toward that logical end of the dying process, and I had wanted to be present to witness and to help in any way that I could. I'm one of those siblings who is NOT there as the first line, but I come when I can and try to be useful, and I try to support my sister from afar. A very, very different journey and role from what you are doing, but each one is unique.
I smiled at your "rallying" story, because our mother changed her mind about dying during the holiday season, became much more interested in eating (almost enthusiastic, depending on what we could provide of the "whatever you want" diet vs. the nursing home, dietician-approved fare). She even joined the family for an early New Years Eve night of table games. She wasn't very competitive but she did enjoy all of the humor the rest of us provided.
I figure that dying in South Dakota may be a process like the rivers take on their way across the high prairie--windy (pronounced once each way, maybe--once for the winding path AND once again for that endless wind that makes every day something other than what the thermometer will tell about). We all know where it ends but not how long or through what adventures it will take to get there.
I know, offhand, of no other poet who takes on writing about the stuff of caregiving--of the way "the ties that bind" can simultaneously define and entrap us, give us meaning and then frustrate our need to capture that in art or writing. I can read dozens of poets who beautifully capture nature (other than human nature), sex (especially casual sex), or death as an existential dilemma (but not as a bodily event). But if poetry has a forbidden topic it must be this---responsibility. Yours is not the stuff of Alan Ginsberg or Jack Keroac (whose daugther described him, at the time of his death, as a jerk. Sorry i have no academic reference on that...just a distant memory of a radio interview at the time, and my nodding, unsurprised--this was before my husband left to find himself...) And you make poetry of this. And I thank you, and look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with your writing.
Is it like that, being a published writer? Do you know how you work becomes the friend in somebody else's head? Someday when I'm back in Vermillion we'll maybe have that conversation, which will be unique for me because the writers that got me through other life passages (Tillie Olson and Grace Paley when I was a young mother; Adrienne Rich in my longing years ;Audre Lourde when I fell deeply in love in my 30's; bell hooks rediscovered recently; Margaret Lawrence again and again) were the objects of completely on-sided friendships in my imagination with no hope of actually sharing a beer a Carey's.
Cheers,
Serena