As I related a couple of years ago in the first installment of this column, I was raised in the country.
Way out in the country. Farther. Farther. Keep going. Welcome to the boondocks.
We were about a mile past that.
Off the dirt road was a long, narrow, winding driveway that led down a hillside to a humble green house on the edge of the valley. From kindergarten through my junior year of high school, I walked that driveway to catch the school bus. (For my senior year, Mom got me an old Chevy Nova. I had wheels, sugar!)
During the early years of grade school, before my parents divorced, my mother would stay home and watch me from the front window. It was too far to hear one another, but when the weather was clear, we could see each other and communicate with big hand signals.
"If there's ever a time when you can't hear me," she said, pointing her index finger back and forth between us and making an 'OK' sign with her hand, "this means 'I love you.' And if there's ever a time when you can't see or hear me but can reach me, then this is what we'll do," as she squeezed my hand three times firmly.
So for years, through the window, Mom and I would gesture "I love you" before I caught the school bus for the long ride away from home. Such a simple action taking place decades ago.
Earlier this month, my precious editor gave me a bye week on my column when I phoned him upset. I received the call from the doctor to come home. The fifth stroke in two years had obliterated my mother. This one was larger than the first two combined, the ones which originally put her in the nursing home.
The doctor spoke hastily. She's beyond immobile. Paralyzed. Can't swallow, not even her saliva. Ventilators. Feeding tubes. Decisions.
Come now.
I canceled appointments, grabbed a bag and hit the road.
I called Mom. The nurse held the phone so she could hear. She tried to talk, but her motor skills were greatly affected. I made out a few words and told her I was on the road for the six-hour drive. She managed a "Be careful." She was tired. I told her we'd visit more when I got there.
Over the next several days, I sat with Mom. I tried to be her advocate in the health care system, which I'll say is far more difficult than being an advocate in the legal system. I tried to help preserve what dignity I could for her. She looked helpless. And she was.
Mom and I have had a tumultuous relationship. We didn't see eye-to-eye on a whole lot over the years. Embittered by the hand life dealt her, she was more often than not quite difficult to be around and exceedingly hard on her only child. And although each stroke takes more and more of the person I know, if I look closely, there is beauty to be seen, even in this time. A tarnished silver lining has been the washing away of all that bitterness. She's soft, kind and gentle now, things of which my mother has never been accused.
I held her right hand, the one good limb she could still move.
Late one evening, Mom looked over at me. I squeezed her hand three times firmly. She slowly responded in kind. We both smiled a little. And though the room was full of people coming and going and prodding and poking, not another soul knew of that moment between us.
I'm not ready to lose her. She'll never see where I live or what I'm planning or whether I remarry or know any of the stories and adventures I'll share with you in my column. For all the hardness she clung to for so many years and for all the questionable tactics she took in rearing me -- and there were some doosies -- she's still my mom and she was there when no one else was. I thought I was more prepared, as this process has been a death by a thousand cuts with so many ailments for so long, but ...
I'm not ready to say goodbye.
And yet, in the words of A.A. Milne's beloved Winnie-the-Pooh, "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
Commentary on 03/20/2014