Etching Meaning Onto an Ordinary Stone

The dying is over, and the official acts of mourning, too. I’m left asking something as basic as what does it mean to live, and who am I now, and as I sit in my favorite chair to write this for you, with my coffee made just the way I like it, while my favorite songs spill through the speakers inset in the walls, I can’t recall a time I’ve ever felt so free.

By which I do not mean unencumbered, but rather, able to move forward.

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Mom died five weeks ago this morning. She passed at 2am and we kept vigil for hours, and when they finally came for her body the sun was up. Dan, Avery and I stood at the end of the driveway with our arms around each other and we raised our right hands in a respectful goodbye as they took her away.

Because amidst the absurdity of death it feels comforting to do something very normal like wave a person goodbye even though they’re already gone.

They say the body keeps the score. After looking after Mom for two years, culminating in her final year, with its hardest last four months, and a brutal final few weeks, my body had become like an elaborate sand castle that was pelted by an angry rain until the last bits of it were subsumed by the high tide which finally came for it, and which, like any high tide, could have been predicted. Two days after her service, with visiting family still in rooms elsewhere in the house, I melted completely into the contours of sheets that hadn’t been washed in months, choked by a cough that sounded like the bark of seals while a putrid moisture settled about me.

It was like that for four days. I cancelled meetings, while wondering why I even have meetings, and if any of this is even worth it, and wouldn’t I rather just be by the seaside with my beloved until they come and drive my body away.

Then today, Saturday, the cough is getting better, I have slept pretty well, and I feel good enough to shower and come downstairs. And you see Mom died on a Saturday, and her celebration was a week ago today, also a Saturday, and my mind’s like Saturday Saturday Saturday, leaving me wondering whether Saturdays will turn out to mean something, or if I’m doing that thing people do of trying to etch a word of wisdom onto an ordinary stone.

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I go downstairs and rediscover my home. I survey the plants and countertops and dirty dishes and other things that are my responsibility. I am delighted by how well my family has done without me, and also delighted that things are in a small bit of disarray. Because if a person is gone for a few days their absence should show.

This is where I would add something about the impact of Mom’s absence, but while she has been gone five weeks, the truth is that she has been barely here for quite awhile such that we have long since created new patterns for doing the work of life without her. Which is why – I now realize – she felt so helpless. What my mother wished – I now realize – was for us to ask her to wash a dish, or scrub a counter, or water a plant when instead – I imagine – she saw in us doing all the things the compounded even exponential nature of her own decline.

If I could do it over, among other things, I would give her some tasks to do until the very end. Because doing IS living, and I only realize that now that it’s too late. And I offer it up to you in case it helps you do better by someone for whom you will be a caregiver or already are.

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I walk over to the sink full of dishes and a dishwasher that is three quarters full yet gives no hint as to whether it’s clean or dirty or partly both. I feel a bit of joy at getting to do my regular task.

During the first decade of living here in this house with Mom, which began when I was thirty-four, I never felt I had the agency an adult should have because I couldn’t figure out how to be her daughter while also trying to be grown. I imagine she also struggled with how to have agency in this house as a fully grown woman, widow, and grandmother, whose daughter and son-in-law had opinions and ways of their own.

Every four or five months, an ordinary complaint between Mom and me would roil and then boil over, at which point she and I would explode at each other in this very kitchen. Over the years, the once new red-tiled floor darkened with wear, as we heaped our ugly unexamined pains from long ago upon it. No one ever “won” these arguments. But we were both trying. And you’d better believe we both left it all on the floor, equally matched, as if we were fighting a mirror. This antagonistic aspect of our mother-daughter dynamic only abated when Dan and I were able to build Mom a separate cottage. A move which was good for us all.

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Standing in this kitchen of memories, I allow myself to feel it all. I pick through the items in the sink, deciding first to hand-wash a good knife and then I gently nestle a wine glass in the dishwasher rack. Next, I retrieve the coffee pot from a corner of the sink, rinse it, add fresh water, and pour the water into the coffee machine. Then I grind some beans, empty them into the tiny basket, and press the button to start it brewing. Finally, I open Pandora only to discover that it has been so long since I put on music for myself that my favorite music app has to be downloaded again. I have to be patient. And I am.

I amble along the careworn red-tiled floor in flip flops. My toes are clad in dark blue. A belt holds up these favorite old jeans. My black t-shirt boasts of what strong women can do. I hold my hands up to the mid-morning light that streams through the window over the kitchen counter where my mother would always stand to read the newspaper in the early years of our togetherness, and the carefully chosen pieces of metal I wear on my wrist, thumbs, and fingers glimmer. Dan likes to say of me that I don’t wear jewelry, I wear hardware. He’s right.

Pandora is ready. All on its own accord, it plays Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls. I try not to burst into tears over how the Universe, God, or somebody has managed to sate my most basic need in serving up not just my favorite group of all time, but the first of their songs I ever stood for and sang along with as if giving a testimony in a crowd of revivalists when I was just twenty.

Then comes Anna Nalick with her piece, Breathe (2AM), with its lyric about writing a song “so it no longer threatens the life it belongs to.” I sing with her and feel the presence of all my past decisions. My mind serves me a memory from my early forties, the last time I sang full-throated in a music duo of my own, alongside a woman I wrote and played music with and whom ultimately I fell for before it all went to hell. And I realize it is only in my grief over Mom that this other moment starts showing.

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The things I’ve done.

My voice is now fifty-seven and damaged, which I attribute to choices and consequences. Nevertheless, in my kitchen on a Saturday morning I press my voice toward places it thinks it can no longer go, ask the breath to sustain the note while I experiment with what will make the vocal chords move the way I want them to, knowing I am not likely to sing beautifully ever again.

But still I sing. And I breathe in my comfortable house and putter about the old and tired red-tiled floor, and sip my coffee in my favorite jeans, and tend a plant just so, and summon the daughter still in me who can coexist peacefully alongside the adult she became, grateful to the Mother who first taught us song, who sang to me young, and sang with me always, and whom in the final months I led in song as a way to enjoy something together with what little she could remember.

Oh! How I hope one of the things she forgot was how I’d fight with her in this kitchen. Or that if it remained in memory, that she forgave me, or better yet, understood me.

And I look out at the beautiful garden Mom planted and tended, and feel a sunlit satisfaction, finally, with how we managed to live together at all, and even in its mess and muck, how at times we even did so exquisitely.

xo

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