After our visit with Mother, our hearts sit in our chests like stones wrapped in old despair.
As soon as we walked into her room, we knew that she was different. Worse. In decline.
She was lying on her back, staring at the television, her mouth open like an infant. She looked at us. She was frail and weak. The skin around her eye was bruised, like a black eye in a cartoon. Mother said it was from her scratching too hard. She had a rash, the origin or cause of which the nursing staff hadn't yet tracked down. and she scratched at it on and off all day. One of the nursing aides said to us,
"You her son, ain't you? We thought you was. We knew you was gonna get mad about that bruise on her face." When I asked her to elaborate, the aide shrugged and said,
"I jis' work weekends. I don't know nothin'."I asked Mother, "Did someone hit you?" She looked me square in the eye and said, "No."
I pressed her. "Would you tell me if someone did hit you?" She said that she would. After asking one more time whether or not someone had hit her, I dropped the subject.
Within a half-hour, MeeMaw and I were exchanging worried looks. The deterioration of Mother's mental strength was obvious. She was confused as to the day, as to when we had arrived, as to what we were doing there. Within the span of four or five spoken paragraphs, I took the measure of my Mother's remaining life and knew that the woman entire was lost to me forever. She had retreated inside herself to await the horror and boredom and stress of her daily lot.
After a little painful conversation, I asked Mother, "So do you think you'd feel like getting out of here for a while and taking a ride?" She surprised me by immediately answering in the affirmative.
So MeeMaw helped her dress and use the bathroom while I signed her out and brought the car up to the front door. We wheeled her down the hallway and out the door, and I thought again, just for a second, about aiming the car towards Possum Cough and leaving all her scant worldly goods in the nursing home and driving driving driving driving driving away from this prettified prison and its sullen support staff and its obese nurses with the bored eyes and the too-loud, condescending cigarette-stinking voices. But I lifted my mother into the car like a piece of furniture and I placed her wheelchair in the trunk and I got in and said, "Where would you girls like to go?"
We drove out to the little house where I grew up still stands. It has bars on the windows and a weed-choked yard protected by a poorly-constructed fence. After cruising around the once-thriving downtown area and enduring the hostile stares of those who now inhabit my hometown, we headed out of town to the country cemetery where my mother's people are buried. The graveyard sits on the other side of a quiet road from a massive cotton field. Mother noticed the cotton and commented on the quality of the crop. When we stopped at the cemetery, I went into the cotton field and picked her a stalk with an open boll and an unopened one on it. She said, "I'll put that up on my wall in my room. But they'll take it away from me."
Mother refused to let me take her out of the car to look around the cemetary. She sat in the car and talked to MeeMaw while I strolled around and took a few pictures. The delta dirt was as black as I remembered, rich with prehistoric water and the bitter tears of sharecroppers. Sharecroppers like my mother's family, all gathered to their fathers and resting in the black, alluvial soil. When I was done, we left and drove back to town, winding through the cotton fields and the rice paddies. It was midday, and Mother admitted that she could eat a bite, so we stopped at one of her favorite places and took a meal. Mother wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and coffee. She coughed so hard while trying to eat that I feared she had aspirated some food. And I thought,
"She will choke like this someday in her room, and no one will be there to help her."After she finished coughing, she was so weak that we decided it was best to return to the nursing home. She didn't protest, and this was significant. As MeeMaw said later, "All the fight has gone out of her."
So we returned to the nursing home, and I hung her cotton stalk up on the wall behind a portrait of MeeMaw and me, and we sat and talked with her, until the shadows lengthened and time forced us to begin our goodbyes. We tucked her into bed and made her as comfortable as we could, and then I talked quietly to her for a few moments, telling her that if she went home to be with her Lord before I saw her again, to look for me in the heavenly kingdom, and that I would be watching and looking for her. She kissed my face and weakly poked fun at me for the thousandth time about my beard, and promised that she would look for me on
the far side banks of Jordan.We said goodbye and told her that we loved her, and she told us that she loved us, and I backed out of the room, and that tough little woman with the burning blue eyes, the strong little woman who raised two children alone against staggering opposition, the fierce little woman who gave me the uniquely Southern gift of blood-pride, the tired little woman who wants to go home...she held my gaze until the industrial-yellow wall moved between us and cut her off from my sight. Who can say whether we will
see each other again under the Arkansas sun?
Both MeeMaw and I cried on the long drive back home, and we asked many questions that will likely never be answered. That night, the moon was a red smudge behind charcoal clouds, and I felt as if we were driving down down down into a tunnel, and I could hear Mother's wheezing breath as the big trucks blew past us.
My mother is in a bad place and I cannot rescue her, and my faith flickers like the light in her Celtic eyes. Praise to His kingship that He never makes mistakes, and that He will be waiting for me on the other side of the blasphemous anger I feel toward him on this day when His skies have been weeping on us and His word has been sitting hard in my heart, like a stone wrapped in old despair.
I am much troubled in spirit, and comfort is far from me. Easy, pious cliches are near at hand and easy to access; all I need do is ask someone to pray and I will be virtually buried in such useless sentiments. But I have a tiny clutch of friends who have known pain as deep and green and cold as the Strathclyde, and they will sit on the ground with me and be silent while I talk of the sad, slow death of a life-giving mother. There is none like her. Nor shall there ever be again. God be praised for her.
The Book of Common Prayer tells us that in the midst of life, we are in death. I would note that in the midst of death, we are in life. Yesterday, our dog brought this home to me.
I took Bonnie for a walk after we got her home from the kennel. We went up into Mr. Davidson's pasture, just across the road from our front pasture. She likes to nose around up there, sometimes finding deer sign or chipmunks worth chousing. Often, she makes these pogo-stick vertical boinging leaps up and down so that she can see over the tall grass. With her reddish fur, she looks like a kangaroo when she does this.
Bonnie-Roo. There's a little cut-through between Mr. D's pasture and the cemetery, and we often take this path up into the cemetery. When we get to the top, I'm usually wheezing like the geezer that I am, and I usually sit down and Bonnie sits with me and we look at the Clinch Mountains and watch the cows and I daydream of my past youthful endurance and Bonnie daydreams of chousing - and
catching - a big ol' heifer.
So yesterday when we started to pass through the cut-through, Bonnie stopped and wouldn't go any farther. When I tried to coax her on through to the cemetery, she turned around and pulled - backwards, mind you - on her leash, trying to keep me from walking forward. So I began to drag Bonnie with me. Seeing that I wasn't going to turn back towards Possum Cough, she ran around in front of me and stood, pressing her weight against my legs. Every time I tried to pass around her, she cut me off and leaned against my legs, stopping me.
Now I need to back up a bit. Not long ago, Bonnie and I were in the cemetery at dusky-dark when she began to act in a very curious manner. Her hackles went up, she began a low, deep growl, and she was looking at two tombstones. I began to think of how animals can sometimes see things we can't (like Baalam's donkey, for instance), and I got a wee bit nervous, wondering if some ghost or apparition was about to step out from behind one of the granite markers. We beat feet out of there in a hurry. Never did see anything, but the experience certainly creeped me out.
So when Bonnie was doing this "Don't go in there, PeePaw!" routine, I was thinking that perhaps she was sending something, well, otherworldly. My curiosity prevailed, and I pulled my dog on toward the cemetery. I was just about to step over a sapling tree at the entrance to the graveyard when something made me stop and look closer.
A two or three foot-long copperhead was coiled there, waiting.
I held Bonnie's leash tight in my fist and reached for a large rock. I slammed the rock down on the serpent, but my aim was a bit off and he began trying to slither away. I stepped on his head and then just behind his neck, and I stomped and stomped until he was dead. Bonnie was going absolutely insane while I was dispatching the ancient enemy.
When we got back to the farmhouse, Bonnie got two treats and a lot of love from two very grateful old folks. She's earned her place at Possum Cough, without a doubt.
Such experiences do make one think of the fragility of life. Such experiences make one think of how to best use the time one has left in this life. And such experiences tend to cement one's conviction that when one dies, one would rather be thrown in a ditch and forgotten than to be eulogized like
this.We're about to grill us some grass-fed, antibiotic and hormone-free Scottish Highland t-bones. It's all about Labor Day, donchoo know.
Rest well, loved ones.
