GARY SMITH: An end, a beginning

Our world expands, contracts with passage of time

Her world had begun to shrink, the subtractions outnumbering the additions. Time was taking more than it gave.

It hadn't always been like that. Once her world had been as wide as hope, as wide as promise, as wide as the future.

Wide as the Oklahoma sky, with views unobstructed by the coming realities of life, realities like a hardscrabble farm existence, a challenging family situation and the roadblocks and boundaries women of her time faced.

Wide as the ocean, described to her in letters sent by a young sailor she'd met through friends and who wrote to tell her funny stories so she wouldn't worry about him, even though the world was at war and his ship was in the middle of it.

Wide as the nation she would travel with that young sailor when he came home and they married and he decided to join the Air Force. Born and raised in Oklahoma, she would leave with him and not return for more than a visit for the next 30 years.

Wide as family and friends and hobbies and travels and hundreds of books she read and kept. As wide as life itself.

And then it started to contract. She lost a child. Then her husband. The house, only the second one they had ever owned after a lifetime in base quarters, was suddenly too much for her to maintain. The last town they had lived in together was too far away for her family to take care of her.

It was harder to get around. Her shoulders hurt; her knees ached. She became more dependent on others, lost more and more of the independence she treasured so much.

Her world was now three rooms in an assisted-living facility. But that didn't seem to bother her. She thrilled to hear the stories of ancestors uncovered when her daughter took up genealogy. And she made sure to ask about all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, tracking their progress through life. Part of the past, part of the future. It was just the present that was the problem.

She fell, or rather took to falling. The dexterity that had allowed her to navigate various houses and children and pets and all of it while carrying laundry or dinner or the weight of her family finally deserted her. At first the falls left bruises, then breaks, until finally she was in the physical rehabilitation wing of a hospital. And she knew, just like her family knew, that even three small rooms was too much for her any more. And that her world was going to shrink again.

Her doctor said it could have been the first fall or the second, or no fall at all. Maybe something just got weaker and gave way. Whatever it was, there was bleeding that led to pressure. That led to the call to her daughter that she was still breathing, but they couldn't wake her up. And her world suddenly became defined by a bed in a hospital room.

Her family gathered around her, quiet at first, then more lively as they shared stories and anecdotes and tales. She was there in the room, but who knows where she was? Maybe on a sandy beach in Florida or a sand dune in New Mexico or a lakeshore in Michigan. Maybe all her children were with her. Maybe her husband had just come home from work and they were about to take a walk.

Experience and training told the nurse all she needed to know, and she checked on Barbara Smith one last time and left the room. And early Saturday morning, surrounded by loved ones who held her hand and rubbed her shoulders, my mother's world suddenly got much larger again. As big as the universe. As big as forever.

We define our existence in a physical sense. Buildings, bodies, real things we can put our hands on, see with our eyes. Our faith tells us there's more, but the details seem to have been left to us to work out in the moment.

But maybe our lives don't shrink; they expand. We become part of everything that was and everything that will be, becoming part of the larger world, part of those who have gone before and those who are yet to come and, most importantly, part of those we love and who love us, forever. We don't lose them because they're with us always, a part of us until we, too, join that larger universe.

Maybe my mother knows that now. It's a happy thought, anyway.

Commentary on 09/28/2018

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