When she was here, my mother would lie on her bed after I helped her shower, on top of the long white towel she insisted I put down so the bed wouldn’t get wet. But I thought of that towel as part of her cocoon, the one I made by putting another long white towel on top of her, and one small one for under her feet because the main towel wasn’t long enough, and one for under her head of course, because I wanted her hair to dry, but in her mind it was there to prevent the pillow from absorbing all that wetness from her hair, always so careful, my mother. Then I’d put her comforter over this sandwich in which she was the filling, and tuck her in.
With her arms and legs immobilized inside this wrapping, by weakness more than by swaddling, and her now small head peeking out over the cover, she seemed to me almost like my child. She pulled forth from me all the same sweet painful love I had only known for my children, with almost but not quite the same targeted piercing as I felt when my breast milk came in. My mother in my care, so completely, so willingly and with utter belief in her security – it was just the same as with my children. And the sensation, this belief I felt from her, made me love her in a new old way. And when I bent down to kiss her just as I would have my child who was going down for a nap, I was even able to nuzzle her neck in a tickling way that made her giggle, then look into her laughing eyes with my loving ones.
I’d announce that I’d come back into her room in ten or fifteen minutes to check if she were dry and ready to dress, but we both knew I meant I’d really be back in as many as thirty minutes because I’d be trying to get something done in the kitchen and on top of that I had no sense of time. That she knew it and knew that I knew she knew, made her love me in a new way as well. I’d like to think so, anyway. We also both knew that she needed more than 10 or 15 minutes anyhow to recover from the exertion the shower required, but that didn’t make either of us love more or differently, it just made us sad.
My mother had pancreatic cancer, diagnosed at least when she was 85, in some sort of merciful grace by an unseen god. On the other hand, for a woman determined to live into her nineties, it still sucked. She didn’t want to leave; she hadn’t stopped enjoying us all, and the small pleasures that came with her every day. Such a modest woman, she didn’t ask for much and was more than delighted by all that she nevertheless received: our attentions, her comfort and independence, the joys of watching her grandchildren and great grandchildren metamorphizing, the familiarity of the signs on her neighborhood roads, her simple routine just the way she liked it. And so, aware that she might not live into her nineties after all, she determined instead to live as long as she could, and fight against the cancer as hard as an 85-year-old with, well, with pancreatic cancer, can. As she had also lost almost 40 pounds in two months of intermittent hospitalizations which included recovery from a life-threatening surgical accident, leaving her so weak that she was unable to perform even daily living tasks, this made the effort required absurdly difficult, but she was not deterred.
My sisters and I decided that as the daughter with the best layout for her limited strength and mobility, the most unstructured, uncommitted time available, and an observed impressive endurance for those small irritations that can build and build with continuous exposure to one’s mother, sick or no, I would be the one to take her in and see to her care. I think they knew, though, that it was what I wanted. I’d go to the mat for it. My sisters would come for wonderful long visits with our mother, and I would be able to leave for the occasional social engagement, or my own doctor appointments, but always I returned to her without the weight of obligation. I carried instead a kind of gratitude, even a shameful pride, that I could make sure my mother’s existence was the most comfortable one possible in her condition.
She knew this. She knew I was compelled to be the one, driven by devotion or some perceived claim. It could have been because I spent the least time with her, called her least of any of us over the preceding ten years or so, and I felt I had to make that up; or maybe it was because I carried the knowledge that I had spent much of my adult life working through the not always so hidden sorrows and insecurities I developed in part as a result of emotional barriers she erected, which I knew, of course, were the result of her own sorrows and insecurities as a child. . . and so perhaps I felt I had to make our last months (or what I hoped would be years) together as intimate and rid of shadows as they could be. It was true that, due to reckonings with my own daughter, and my fuller appreciation of all the ways I had fallen short for her, indeed due to the understanding I acquired over the years of so many things, I was primed to show my mother a new kind of unadulterated love.
But maybe it was because I needed to show her that I loved her desperately as no other could, as much as when I was child, and I wanted her favor and undivided attention as I did then. As the third child coming into a busy working class household, I never really felt I had the individual attention from her that I wanted. And dammit I was gonna get it! I was going to have it, have her, all to myself. . . It’s this last possibility that disturbs me. And yet, even to the extent it may have been true, my mother silently understood all of this. All the reasons, whether noble or pathetic, she accepted as originating from a pure place (as did my sisters, loving and generous souls that they are). Perhaps on some level my mother even recognized that my troubled relationship with my daughter mirrored somewhat the one she had had with me, in that I too had been the unhappy, solemn, and lonely child whom my mother cherished but did not know how to help; though neither of us needed to speak of that – she, because she did not like to reveal herself or reflect on the past, and I because I had already forgiven her so thoroughly that I wouldn’t even think to bring it up.
When I returned to my mother’s room, she usually reported that she was ready for the rest of our post shower ritual, which included dressing of course, but always began with the drying of her toes. This precise operation, developed in response to her complaints that previous toweling had not sufficiently done the job, entailed my softly running the narrow edge of a dry washcloth between her toes. And it is the drying of the toes that I think of now, this small activity that somehow was the perfect expression of our momentary happiness, away from her cancer, away from the end, in being mother and daughter. I was the one providing the care this time, but it could just has well have been her, when I was in her care, before memory even, running a dry washcloth through my toes in the same way. We were back all the way to that space, before the barriers had time to click into place. Adoring caretaker and trusting receiver, both feeling safe in having their attachment truly known.
If dressing exhausted her further, she’d tell me she needed to remain in bed for a little while longer, perhaps a half hour, for a little nap. She knew that I’d let her sleep for longer than that, because I’d be trying to accomplish some mundane administrative task, or even perhaps get back to a poem I was writing; and I knew she secretly was relieved by my anticipated imprecise adherence to the clock, because she had not yet gathered the will to rise, to make her slow way down the hall to her chair in the family room. But sometimes, before leaving her to rest, I’d lie down next to her, alongside her freshly made cocoon of sheet and comforter, and quietly sing her a song she had once sung to me: This is the story of two little babes who were left in their uncle’s care… This didn’t rankle. We both knew it was my way of telling her that I felt how much she had loved me, and that I carried it still. Sometimes she would join me, sometimes she would just listen and remember.
We all went to bed at the same time. We all wore matching pajamas. We made up games that inevitably involved jumping from bed to bed, a feat made possible by the fact that the beds were only about eighteen inches apart if that. And on summer nights, we all saw the same twilit sky from our two open windows, felt the small, hopeful breeze stirring, and heard the summer sounds from the neighborhood floating up to us.
