Maybe I should be worried - I've been thinking of my mother and her last weeks lately. No idea what's triggered it. Maybe I feel like the 'mother' part of me is going, going, gone with the advancing ages of my children? Maybe my life here in her house has taken a very Eunice and Jim turn?
I remember the night Dad died. Mother called me around 10 pm to say 'Daddy is very sick and I can't get him out of the bathroom.' Not because he was hogging up his time limit, but because she was, by then, pretty much crippled from arthritis and couldn't support his weight. I told her to call 911, I would meet them at the hospital and David would come get her. She bumped down the stairs on her bottom to open the door for the paramedics and they had to carry her back up. Throughout those hours she sat beside him in her wheelchair, holding his hand. At various times he had private conversations with David and I, saying goodbye and thank you for being a good son and daughter, giving mother into our care. When the time came and Dad began to fly away mother didn't cry. She watched stoically, holding his hand tightly. Then she pushed herself up out of her wheelchair, laid her hands on him and prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for their marriage. I don't think I have ever been so proud of being Eunice's daughter. When I brought her home we lay in her bed, weeping. "What am I going to do without him?" she kept asking.
The answer came a month later. Aunt Martha had moved out of the downstairs apartment, we renovated it for mother and planned to move into the upstairs to take care of her. Our thoughts were that somewhere down the line we'd sell and get a bigger house for all of us. When I took mother on a tour of her new apartment she said, "Well now, I've lost everything. My husband, my home and my independence." I came in the morning for my daily visit and found her sitting in her green chair by the window. She was gazing out at the familiar scene. She turned and smiled at me. "Daddy was here. He said it was ok to come. Do you think I was hallucinating?" "No," I said, "I think he really did speak to you. I'm sure he's waiting for you."
From that moment on she didn't have another sad day. She quietly went about her business.
She developed what I thought was a cold. I made the doctor treat her. 'Rest' was all they would say. It wasn't a cold, of course, it was congestive heart failure that had been coming on for years. The only reason she had lived this long was because of Dad. "Bring her to the ER" said the doctor. I couldn't believe it. I wheeled her in and we had to sit in the waiting room. She kept smiling at a point in the far corner. We finally got to a booth in the ER, undressed, comfortable on a gurney if that's possible, waiting for tests and more doctors. I was reading a book when mother said, "Oh look, there's Daddy." We looked up the hallway in front of us, maybe 30 feet away. A short man stood in profile, wearing the shabby brown tweed coat Dad was buried in, scuffed brown shoes, his arms folded akimbo as was his usual, a thin line mouth expression. He rocked back and forth exactly like Dad did. Mother and I looked at one another, and when we looked back the man was gone. Now you tell me.....
The next week was mother's last. I sat by her bed almost 24/7. Her friends came to say goodbye, sing hymns, pray with her. They brought their children who loved 'Granny the Cookie Lady'. She and I shared the secrets of her life, things I had suspected but didn't know for sure. People from the 40s and their peccadilloes, the stray baby, the children gone wrong. Saintly behavior, grace in the face of disaster. I fastened a picture of Dad in his wedding suit on her tubing so she could see it without moving. One day when I came she said, "He's here, you know." and smiled her young girl's 'I know a secret' smile. She was getting younger by the hour. I was amazed. One would think a dying woman would get older, but no, she was going back, back in their lives together.
On the day she died, I apologized for being such a brat of a kid and she said, "I loved being your mother." I will never receive a gift as precious as that from my dying mother. As they took her up to hospice I put Dad's picture in her hand and she breathed her last holding on to him. Do I think he was there? You bet. She stopped struggling which she had been doing for the last week and with a gentle sigh, drifted away.
I saw her several times over the next month. I had a waking dream where she showed me heaven and answered questions I posed to her. I wrote this all down as it was appearing to me and have that paper framed in my home. One night, about 3 months later, I felt her presence beside my bed, leaning over me, tenderly. She said, "Its time for me to go. You'll be just fine. In motherhood is your salvation." And I have never again felt her presence. I do meet her in dreams when I need her as has happened several times, too many to be coincidence.
And here I am, right now, wanting my mother. Maybe she'll come to me tonight in my dreams?
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