The warmth of memory and the savage passing of time

My mother lies in a hospital bed in North Central Florida, dying slowly and possessed with an intriguingly imaginative dementia.

Last night she told me that her kind neighbor, who discovered my mother on her kitchen floor four days ago and called EMS, has a sister who lives down the road with her husband and children. This family, my mother told me frankly but conspiratorially, is not nearly so kind. Instead, this family lives in a secret outer wing of the same ICU where my mother lies wasting--a secret glass wing that had been built specifically for this woman and her family. Way out in an adjacent grassy horse field they dwell, she and her family, in a glass-covered vestibule, eating their meals in the echoes and blips of the unsuspecting ICU unit down a long hidden hallway.


There are too many things to say right now for any one thing to seem relevant. I could tell you about my mother, circa 1970, in a bathing suit--cigarette in hand, the other hand on cocked hip, yelling some instruction to me and my sister from the shoreline where she stood. Our summer friends called her the Mayor of the Beach.

It wouldn't mean much, though, and it wouldn't be anything close to what I want to say.

So instead, right now, I try to picture my mother somewhere once like me, now: sitting cross-legged on a big messy morning bed, laptop on stacked pillows in her lap, birds singing in the courtyard behind her, sullen lover sitting at his own laptop through the door at the foot of the bed.

In other words, I try to imagine her in a life she never lived.

My mother has had many chances at her life, many stops and re-starts, and I suppose in this way I'm like her. I don't seem to live in small gestures either. I've often wondered who my mother would have become if she had been able to pull off second chances the way I have. I believe it's partly because of her that I actually have--her feisty, indeterminable spirit lives in me. Her anger taught me other things, too: that it is only safe to live with fangs ready to bare. This is turning out to be a hard bell to un-ring.

As for my mother, true to form, I believe her going-out is going to be one hell of a ride.

So here I sit, wondering now about who she might have been if luck had somehow intervened. I wonder who she would have been had she been allowed the space and the understanding her soul needed, right from the start. She didn't have a very good chance with what she was given. Neither did she ever figure out a way to stop fighting and make a chance open up.

I'm trying to honor my mother in what seem to be her last days, fighting for some scrap of her life because I believe that is what she would want. I know she would fight for me this way. There has never been any question in my heart that she would go to battle for me. Doing battle was often the most mothering she could do.

If I haven't completely forgiven her for this yet, I hope to, someday.