Mom was good at everything
When mom was dying, she filled my thoughts; at her bedside, while I drove, as I lay in bed trying to doze off. I wrote this in June 2017.
I am mourning my mother. But she’s not dead yet. Holding her icy hands as R2D2 the oxygen machine whumps at the foot of the hospital bed, I try to focus my thoughts Zen-like on her. Impossible: thoughts flicker in random order heterogeneous as the crabgrass, yarrow and prunella all over the lawn.
She’s in a dog show ring with Douze, our prize-winning standard poodle on a short leash, trying to win yet another blue ribbon in an Obedience Competition. None of that stuff about beauty and haircuts; only smarts count in this branch of dog competitions. Yesterday, I stared at the rows of dusty trophies and moldy ribbons in the barn stashed on the giant hand-hewn cross-beams: what should I do with them? This thought means something: she was a good dog trainer. But I can’t make myself think the right things, because as soon as that insight crystallizes, a catty little inner voice meows “too bad she didn’t have any talent for raising kids.”
Who is this tiny woman under 90 pounds? The photo over her bed of us together makes her look like a sailboat docked next to the Titanic. I am so very, very big and she is so very, very small. She lost a couple inches over the last 10 years, so now she’s under five feet on tiptoes. She often mentioned she was small, but her ferocious energy and presence tended to make most people not even notice this. She’s a big, big little woman, swimming now in her hand-knit sweater. The antique wooden bureau she stripped and stained is stuffed with these sweaters, but those gnarled hands will never knit again. She’s always cold now and wearing a Fair Isle pullover despite the 79 degree settings in assisted living.
As I try to clean out my parents’ house, the unsalable, un-donatable possessions tell a tale of changing generations. Who needs an English muffin griddle, double baguette tins, 4 sets of mini zucchini loaf pans, and 6 shapes of bread boards? I simply cannot find anyone who wants 250 different sizes of knitting needles, gauges and specialty items from her chest, bursting with balls of leftover yarn. And that cask was hand-stripped and stained too — oh, the Super-Fund sites of our backyard with pools of Zip Strip and lead paint, triumphant proof of the beauty of old wood revealed. Would a Brooklyn hipster like stained country pine bureaux, three-legged stools, wood milk bucket with lid and, of course, multiple single-drawer commode? I did manage to stagger out case after case of mason jars to the car to deliver over 100 to a friend who runs a big maple sugar operation on a farm off the grid with only solar power and cordwood.
She barely has enough breath to talk, and I have what she used to call “St Vitus Dance” a congenital inability to sit still. So, I nearly knock over the martini pitcher filled with forsythia and mistletoe, harvested from the door stoop for today’s visit. Every visit to hospice, I bring flowers from her gardens which are blooming in April and May as she fades.
During the five-hour drives from New York to New Hampshire, I try to understand our relationship, marked with conflict, and — over the last 15 years or so — sometimes with love. Other people see her as that terrific dog lady, that amazing gardener, that tireless knitter, that top-notch bridge partner, that speedy NYT puzzle solver, that five-star cook, that relentless antiquer. Further back, it was Del, the avid angler, scouting up secret trout haunts on obscure New Hampshire streams. And even earlier, that queen of the 1950s and 1960s magazine contests, specializing in 25 words or less. She won countless things that plug in, 52 gallons of ice cream and freezer to store it, a trip to Bermuda, a maroon Oldsmobile. She loved that car — and I failed to realize she was reliving her “little Old Lady from Pasadena” dreams when she bought a red Mazda 6 at age 88.
Her determination to excel at everything is stunning. Even now, she is hell-bent on doing a good job of dying. She arranged the paperwork. She has signed DNRs and Advanced Directives and Medical POAs and told those doggone doctors to stop poking, prodding, testing and fixing her. She’s done with that.