I said, “You’ve showed me how, Mom; you’ve always loved all your children the same.”
“Not exactly so. That’s a hard one. Because they are each different. I love all of my children, because they’re mine. But they are each different, each individual, and I want it that way. I love them for what they want to be, and for what they struggle to be, and for their disappointments. I sometimes feel disappointment. But I love each one because of the way they treat me, and how they are with me, and what they bring to me. And they are each different in that. I don’t want them all to be the same. I am happy with how it is. I want them to be individual, because I love them individually.”
Words of wisdom come, and go. Several months later, she said to me, “I know there is something important about you, but I can’t remember what it is,” and then later, “When you walked in the room, I felt something happy, like there was something about your face that was special to me.” Happiness too comes, and goes. I want the cure to come, and not go.
I’ve walked about in a dark cloud lately: taking the kids to school, traveling to Vancouver for Fifty Shades of Grey, performing the various tasks of mother/actress/worker/sister—but not daughter. As a daughter, I feel I am lost in some tunnel where there is no light pointing toward the end, no exit sign or glow-in-the-dark rails to illuminate the path, and I’m stumbling about in ignorance and fear, trying to make sense of what is happening to my mom and praying that it doesn’t happen to me.
I keep imagining my head has a lid on it, and when I open the lid, inside are dead leaves and debris. It is quite dark, and musty. There is no light, there are no green buds springing forth, nothing affirming a hopeful meaning, or a raison d’être. Instead there is only black water pooled at the bottom of the cavity known as my head, rising to the top, threatening to drown me. I want to siphon and dispel the toxic waters. I want to take a leaf blower and blast out all the clutter and mulch and decaying wood and erase anxiety and fear. Once clear, in the blank rows of fertile change, I will plant hope. I will sear my head with warm light, invite in spring and youth, roses, a ladybug, an earthworm perhaps, a sliver of sunshine dancing on a dragonfly’s gossamer wings. And then, I want to do the same for my mother. For her, I will siphon away the fog, siphon away the amyloid plaque on her neural synapses, and with my leaf blower blow the damn wheels off of her wheelchair! Then, I will plant bright healing orbs in her brain, and soon, she will remember me. She will remember her life. She will remember herself. I want to see my mother walk straight up and tall, flashing her beautiful teeth, delighted with her children.
We have sold my mother’s lovely home in anticipation of the mounting costs of caretaking. It is one of the hardest decisions we have had to make so far; the loss of her home is something that all of my siblings feel, indeed felt, with such a dread and sense of helplessness that it has somewhat devastated us. I keep reminding myself that we’re doing the best we can, with the tools and knowledge that we have. This is uncharted territory, and most people, certainly my siblings and I, are unprepared for it.
She now lives in a smaller, comfortable ranch-style house that my grandfather built in the sixties. It doesn’t have her plants and her ficus, her pyracantha or American beautyberry. It doesn’t have her ikebana friends or the museums of Fort Worth. Not that she remembers these things exactly, but she feels them. We feel them for her, too. We want things to be “as they were before,” but Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease, and it only marches forward. So we adjust, preparing for the unknown, calculating all possibilities and subsequent actions, and most importantly ensuring her comfort, care, and safety. Where she lives now is lovely. It is a family home. On a lake. Full of birds and old neighbors, near medical needs and a church, near sisters who shower Mom with love and visits, and near caretakers who take wonderful, dutiful, and exacting care of all the various indignities of aging and Alzheimer’s. But the change has depressed us, and the inability to do much, to do more, to set her up like a queen, has darkened my spirit. A second rising is called for, and I’ve sat on my cat-clawed linen couch, meditating with Deepak Chopra and Oprah. (By the way, why has no one coined “Deepak Choprah Winfrey?”) I’ve said the serenity prayer again and again:
God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And the Wisdom to know the difference.
I’ve thought about lightness. And beauty. And the home. I’ve bought daffodils and berry branches and hydrangea, and tried to do an ikebana arrangement, to bring a spot of bright Easter loveliness into my third-floor walk-up on Venice Beach. It droops, poking fun at all that I haven’t yet learned from my mother.
These days, I think about memory, a lot. Every time I fumble for a name, or forget a supposedly familiar face, I worry. So I read constantly about Alzheimer’s and have introduced coconut and vitamin B supplements, gingko and pomegranates into my diet. I’ve cut way back on sugar—some doctors have called Alzheimer’s “Diabetes 3,” and they have linked too much sugar in the brain to mental dysfunction! If I forget where I put my cell phone, I jump on the treadmill right after I find it. Exercise is supposed to put off the possibility of memory loss! I do campaigns to make others aware of the early signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s, and I am flummoxed that the line is so vague between forgetting where one put their keys and true concern for having the disease. I watch the news; the numbers are climbing. Now, it is estimated that 5.5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s or related dementia. Five-point-five million in America, and nearly 47 million people worldwide! Forty-seven million? I am dumbfounded. This is the crime of the century. Why is there not more money and effort and research to discover the cause of Alzheimer’s? Where is the cure? I don’t want to be another statistic, so I compare myself with other people my age, and I test myself, starting by trying to remember my past.
I vaguely remember my childhood. I remember holidays, and certainly I remember our home. But I don’t remember specifics, like the childhood couch. Should I? Do you? Do most people? I wrack my brain for remembered artifacts of youth. I remember a table, and occasionally remember a dresser. I want to remember more: I want to know the stories of the marble dresser, the antique curved china cabinet, the picture that used to hang above the bed in my mother’s guest room—handmade by her when we lived in Japan. It was a colorful scene showing three little Japanese girls, their three-dimensional shapes constructed out of silk kimonos and cotton obis, and they are playing—could it be?—“London Bridge Is Falling Down.”
Much of the furniture that is meaningful to my mother came from Coco, her mom. There are lovely antique wooden carved beds, a pink velvet love chair on which my father proposed to her, a rounded glass china cabinet, writing desks and secretaries. Then there is another style of furniture . . . sleeker, more contemporary. This is the furniture that she acquired—when exactly? I don’t remember—much of it came, I think, from Japan. There is a tansu chest with a secret compartment for hiding treasures. A matching teak china cabinet and buffet, a teak stereo console. A rounded brass table. Childhood stories, a different kind of treasure, is hidden in the furniture.
I will always remember the intricately carved Chinese coffee table with matching wooden nesting tables. It was here that silver-wrapped kisses were hidden on Easter morning. Little fingers would search for presents left by a Bunny, hidden in the tiny rectangles of the innermost stacked table, wedged between carved temples and carved roses. Colorful foil chocolate eggs of pink and green and light blue were tucked among the wooden rectangle squares, hidden so well that a certain three-year-old couldn’t see them. Hidden so well that a certain three-year-old burst into tears as the older girls gathered eggs, jelly beans, and chocolate dreams, and my father bellowed, “Look there, Goddamnit! There!”
I laugh about it today, how unseemly, how un-Easter-like, to roar like that. He was a big man, and could be rather scary to a three-year-old. Yet now I also muse at how frustrated he must have be
en, to have hidden the eggs so carefully with my mom in the dawning morning, black coffee percolating, hoping each child would find their preplanned eggs in their defined area of the living room. Yet I didn’t. How frustrating, to point so many times: “It’s there, Marcia Gay. Right there.” And still I didn’t see it. My sisters desperately wanted to help me, their eyes popping in the direction of the brown coffee table. Me not understanding, not even imagining that an egg could be hidden in someplace so hard to see, but to them, it was as if the egg were sitting right out in the open, with blinkers on, screaming, “I’m here! I’m here!” My mom: “Look again, Marcia.” My dad, pointing again, until the point and instruction became a bellow, a roar, using God’s name loudly and in vain on Easter morning, but all understandable because for him to actually pick up the egg and put it in the plastic green grass of my basket would have forfeited the game . . . the game of the Bunny. The game of finding. The game of basket-filling and chocolate melting on little pursed lips. I will always remember that table with whimsy, with love even—because it has a story of me woven into its carving.
Which stories of my mom are lacquered onto her furniture? What whispers are stored in the carved woodworks of her Japanese screen? What childhood coos murmur under the marble of her dresser? What teenage squirms has the mirror of her vanity witnessed? As she prepared to walk to church each Sunday, and ran next door to her Grandmother Mammy’s house, did she steal a glance of reflected admiration in the oak-framed oval mirror? Jet-black hair and perfectly arched brows, milky pearls hovering over her collarbone, shimmering above softly emerging breasts, staring at herself in the oval looking glass that hung in Mammy’s foyer. A child, delighted in her blossoming. And now, generations later, this same oval hangs in a small bedroom in Mom’s own home. Does the oval mirror long to speak for my mother? To help my mother remember herself? To reflect with her, for her, her life?
Two years ago, Mom caught sight of herself in the small square mirror of the visor in the passenger seat of my car. “Who is that old lady?” she asked, astonished. She didn’t recognize herself. She didn’t remember her face. When her brain caught up to her a second later, she made it a joke, as if to apologize for forgetting that she wasn’t still young. “Ha-ha. You can’t go backwards in time!” But she does. She does go backward in time even as she is moving forward. Like a hummingbird flies. Minutes later she says, “I never thought I would lose my mind. I was always quicker to the punch of a joke than someone else.”
I wish the oval mirror could speak. I wish the bowls and the plates and the china could speak. I wish the boxes and boxes of old magazines, old checkbooks, saved lessons of Greek and Spanish, the spoons and chimes and knickknacks, the silver stapler and the star paperweight with the flag inside it, I wish they could speak, and tell me of my mother’s life. And the vases! Oh, how I wish the vases could spill stories of arrangements and ladies’ chatter at the flower-arranging table. My mother teaching, holding bamboo and shears in her hand, teaching, entwining the philosophy of art and flowers and home while she entwined bright yellow snapdragons with lime-green bamboo.
I think of a second rising “The home should feel peaceful,” she taught, “and the flower arrangements can be reflective of the seasons, or even the holidays and celebrations.” She always somehow honored the holidays with her arrangements. For Easter, Mom often chose a basket for her “container,” or vase. She would tell me, “A new idea is ikebana’s hidden strength,” and then she would combine the basket with an unusual texture, or an unexpected flower. When we were younger, colorful eggs were often used in the bottom of an Easter arrangement, and sometimes moss. Each arrangement had to have a main point of focus. Sometimes it was the color, sometimes the shape, sometimes the container. If Mom had an especially lovely basket of golden woven reeds, she would usually determine that she wanted the container to be the main point of focus. At which point she would study the color, the shape, the depth, and angle of the basket.
Pursing her lips, she would explain that she wanted her Easter arrangement to look like spring. Hope rising. Sun rising. New beginnings, and growth. Scanning the purple iris, the butter-colored daffodil, the ivory lily, she would then choose the material for the arrangement, studying the shape, thickness, and flexibility of the lines she planned to use, and weighing their compatibility with the basket. She breathed in the possibilities, meditating on the placement and balance and space she was creating. “The lines must harmonize or contrast, depending upon your feelings and thoughts,” she would say. “Each line should be placed in a determined fashion—and this is how the arrangement reflects the character and feeling of the creator.” Sometimes the line above the basket rim would be arcing (pussy willow), sometimes spiky (cactus plant). It was as if it were telling a story, understanding what she wanted to express. She would use the shapes and colors, the sharpness or gentle softness of the plants and flowers as an extension of herself. She wasn’t a demonstrative woman. She wasn’t one to wear her emotions and feelings on her sleeve (unlike me), and it was often from these weekly creations that I could discern what she was actually feeling. For Easter, she liked to create arrangements evocative of hope and life bursting forth from darkness. Second risings.
Mom’s hands were small, and her fingers quite delicate, her nails slightly pointed ovals. Her palms were pale. Perhaps I first really noticed her hands when we would dye the Easter eggs, glass bowls arranged on a plastic tablecloth, the cardboard egg holders carefully punched out of the little kits bought at the grocery store. We dropped the colorful tablets carefully into the glass bowls of warm water and watched mesmerized as the colors formed. Mom pricked each end of the raw eggs with a small ice pick. Then she lowered them carefully in the not-yet-boiling water on the stove. And though a little bit of gelatinous white hardened on the end of each egg, they didn’t crack. Our dyed water darkened, the eggs hardened, and then they were set out to cool. Paper towels were laid out, as were crayons, and when the dozen eggs were delivered to the table, we each got to pick three or four. We’d draw stripes or polka dots or swirls with the crayons, then lower first one half of the egg into orange, then the other half into purple, or green or blue or red, and watch with delight as the eggs bejeweled the table.
On Easter Sunday the next morning, each child had their own basket adorned with a colorful silk bow waiting on their mat at the breakfast table. Inside was a large chocolate bunny nestled in the lime-green grass, and the grass was dimpled with the crayon-striped eggs dyed the night before, as well as a smattering of jelly beans.
Once, when my father had returned home from the sea, he brought us those white confectioners’ eggs made of sugar that were carved out in the middle. You could peer through an oval window and peek into a secret scene sculpted in miniature detail inside. My favorite egg had a cozy scene of a bunny in a white apron with red strawberries falling from the sash, sitting at a pink table set for tea. Another had a bunny in a garden, hoeing a green crop. Yet another had two little bunnies in purple bonnets, heading through a white picket fence. All the bunnies were so safe in their confectioner’s eggs, and I loved gazing inside the little ovals and imagining myself in the domestic scene.
On Easter morning, in the center of our dining room table, Mom always made a flower arrangement in a basket—daffodils hidden behind a driftwood curve, fern covering the extra blue eggs she had dyed and would later mash to make an aqua-tinged egg salad sandwich. (Embarrassed at school the next day, my white Wonder Bread now splotched with blue from the leaking dye, gooey blue and green-yellow egg salad oozing about the sides, I would slump slightly forward at the long cafeteria table so others couldn’t see the sickly looking sandwich—yet I ate it with pleasure since it was so delicious. This was before I learned to look around and actually see the rest of the cafeteria, and when I did, I noted that there were other splotchy sandwiches from other mothers. There were orange and blue and green sandwiches, pink and red and purple. Followed by chocolates waiting loose in the bottom of brown paper lun
ch bags, and jelly beans stored in sticky pockets.)
But at home, on Easter morning, before we sat down to pancakes and Aunt Jemima syrup, the hunt had to take place, and every year it was exactly the same. We liked tradition. We didn’t need variety. Just your basic egg and candy hunt, which vaguely had to do with Jesus and second chances. We were let go in a 1—2—3! and began to search under pillows and in picture frames, on lamptops and in plant holders. We popped open plastic eggs and sucked on candies as we crawled on hands and knees and searched under the couch. In a frenzy, baskets were filled, some faster than others, and sometimes tears were shed, chocolate was always smeared on cotton nighties, jelly beans stuck in not-yet-brushed teeth, all culminating with a proud basket of Easter goodies. Only then would Mom make pancakes on an old griddle. Did she actually wear an apron? In my mind she did. A white apron with red strawberries, just like the bunny in my confectioners’ egg. We ate, we put the dishes in the dishwasher, and we washed sticky hands and faces as we prepared to go to church on Easter Sunday. On went the hats! Straw bonnets with pink velvet ribbons circling the center. Little cotton dresses my grandmother had sewn, and patent leather shoes. My mom in perhaps a matching cotton dress. We showed off: We knew we were cute and clean and my mother’s daughters. We knew we smelled of powder and new socks with lace on the edges, and holding black Bibles clutched tightly in our white gloved hands, we knew we were loved by Jesus. Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Well, there it was, a black Bible with my name inscribed on the front page! It must have been living proof of Jesus’s love.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 23
