by Delia Parr
“Havenwood? She’s not here in the hospital?”
“Not since about eight-thirty this morning. I’m sure she’s in her room by now. If you like, you can call her from the nurses’ station before you leave.”
“No. Thank you. I—I have to go,” Ellie stammered, and headed back out to the elevator, too distraught to wonder for more than a second how this caring, compassionate nurse could be the same one who had been so cavalier with her the last time they had talked.
From the outside, Havenwood Care Center, which was located some fifteen miles from Welleswood, looked exactly like what it was—a nursing home.
Inside, however, the main lobby of the single-floor structure was as beautifully decorated, in soothing earthtones, as a hotel lobby. Thick tweed carpet muffled Ellie’s footsteps as she approached a receptionist sitting behind a stylish walnut desk.
The middle-aged woman, who wore her red hair swept up in a chignon, greeted her with a toothy smile. “What lovely flowers. And they smell so good, too! Which one of our guests are you visiting today?”
“Rose Hutchinson. She’s new. I’m sorry, I don’t know her room number.”
“Sign in right here. I’ll check for you,” she said, and slid a register and pen toward Ellie.
While Ellie signed in, the woman tapped the keyboard of her computer. “She’s in room three-oh-five in the Audubon wing. Go right through the double doors on your left, follow the corridor along the courtyard and turn left when you reach the activities room. You can’t miss it.”
Ellie hesitated. “Do I need a pass?”
“Not at all. Just remember to sign out when you leave,” she said before turning to answer the telephone.
Once Ellie went past the double doors, she quickly reached the activities room, where several residents were working on jigsaw puzzles, knitting or just chatting together. She turned left and started down the corridor, where the carpet gave way to a tiled floor. She found Room 305 halfway down the hall.
Since the door to the room was partially open, she merely knocked lightly on her way inside, and braced herself to be berated for not being here earlier. Straight ahead, beyond the empty bed that had been covered with a pretty bedspread, she saw her mother sitting up in bed, talking with a petite young woman not a day over twenty-five, with light brown hair that fell in ringlets halfway to her waist. Dressed in pale pants and a denim blazer, the young woman was holding a clipboard, obviously taking notes.
“Here’s my daughter now,” her mother said, and smiled as Ellie approached.
Although her mother still appeared very frail, she looked almost serene, a marked change that Ellie noticed at once.
The young woman immediately held out her hand as Ellie approached. “Hello, I’m Roberta Morris. I’m one of the social workers here at Havenwood.”
Ellie shifted the flowers so she could shake hands. “Ellie Waters.”
Her mother smiled and held out her hands. “Are those for me, I hope?”
“Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier,” Ellie replied, then handed the pot of hyacinths to her mother and kissed her cheek.
Her mother held the hyacinths up to her face, closed her eyes for a moment as she took a long whiff, and smiled. “Thank you. Now I know it’s Eastertime. Set these right there on the table, will you?” she asked, and handed the flowers back to Ellie with a broad smile on her face.
Ellie set the flowers on top of the gleaming bedside table, which matched the mahogany headboard. She noted the snow-white chenille bedspread on the bed and was impressed by the homey feel to the room.
“Since your mother just arrived today and will be staying with us until she’s strong enough to go home again, I was just going over some admission details with her. We’re nearly finished,” Roberta said before turning to face Ellie’s mother. “Would you like to continue with your daughter here? Or would you like me to ask her to leave?”
Ellie braced herself, expecting her mother to dismiss her. Instead, her mother reached up and took Ellie’s hand. “Ellie is all I have. I’d like her to stay.”
Moved by her mother’s words and her gesture, Ellie didn’t question the transformation in her mother’s attitude. She simply embraced it.
“Fine, then. I know this will be the most difficult part, but it’s something we need to discuss. Please take your time before you answer my questions, and if you need more time, just say so. No one here will be upset or angry if you change your mind later, either. Okay?”
Her mother took a deep breath and nodded.
Roberta continued. “I just need to confirm what the social worker at the hospital wrote down before you left there,” she murmured, her gaze softening. “According to the admissions form, you’ve requested a DNH—Do Not Hospitalize. That means if you become ill again, you’d like us to monitor you here and keep you as comfortable as we can, but you do not want us to send you back to the hospital, even if your illness is life-threatening. Is that right?”
Ellie’s mother tightened her hold on Ellie’s hand. “Yes, that’s what I want,” she whispered.
Ellie’s throat constricted.
“You also specified that should your heart stop beating, you do not want us to engage in any measures to resuscitate you, to start your heart again. We call that DNR—Do Not Resuscitate. Do you agree that’s what you want us to do?” she asked gently.
“Yes, I do,” her mother said, without a heartbeat of hesitation in her voice. “I do,” she repeated firmly.
As the social worker left the room, her mother looked Ellie directly in the eye. “Don’t worry about all that,” she said. “We both know that it’s time for me to make those kinds of decisions. But I also know it’s time for us to talk…because…because while I know I haven’t been the mother you’ve deserved, I want you to know that you have always been the daughter I so deeply wanted to have.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ellie clutched her mother’s hand like a lifeline that held her fast, while her heart pounded hard and steady and her mind echoed with the long-awaited words her mother had spoken. This was the new beginning in their relationship that Ellie had prayed for. It was the dream that she had kept alive with faith and hope, the balm that soothed the bitter hurts and crushing disappointments of the past.
And Ellie knew that, in this same moment, another prayer had been answered—her mother had been given the strength to face her impending death without fear. It was a miracle of transformation in the troubled relationship of a mother and daughter, and a gift of grace for a woman facing the transition from one life to another.
“I’m not sure what to say, except that I love you,” Ellie whispered, glancing down at her mother and gently squeezing her hand.
Head bowed, her mother laced her fingers with Ellie’s and sighed. “After you left the hospital yesterday, Reverend Fisher came to see me. I’m afraid we talked clear through till evening. I hope his wife isn’t put out with me, even though he did call to tell her not to hold supper for him.”
“I’m sure she understands there are times when he’s needed and he can’t avoid being late. She’s been a pastor’s wife for a long, long time,” Ellie reassured her mother.
“And I’ve been a Christian for a long, long time, but that doesn’t mean I’ve always acted like one and lived like one,” her mother confessed and shook her head. “Dying is scary business, Ellie.”
Ellie swallowed the lump in her throat and struggled to find words of comfort, but everything she thought to say sounded hollow. Instead, she asked, “What scares you most?”
“It’s not the dying itself,” her mother replied. “And I’m not afraid of what happens after I die, because I believe in God’s promise that anyone who believes in Him will enter His kingdom. But I am afraid of dying without…without ever having the chance to tell you that I’m sorry,” she whispered, before looking up at Ellie. “I’m…sorry. So very sorry…for everything. I don’t expect you’ll ever be able to forgive me completely for not be
ing the kind of mother I should have been, but…but I’d be able to die in peace if I thought you might one day come to understand why I’ve always been so negative and so critical of everything, and forgive me. Just a little.”
Overwhelmed by her mother’s apology and her request, Ellie let the tears roll down her cheeks, wondering why it had taken so long for the two of them to set aside their differences and simply love each other.
Since Ellie had never had a daughter, her only knowledge about the nature of the mother/daughter relationship was the experience she had had with her mother. After raising two sons, however, she did know that she had never felt any need to compete with them or to compare herself to them, the way she had done her whole life with her mother. Whether that was typical for mothers and daughters did not matter. Not now that Ellie had realized that her mother was not solely responsible for the difficult relationship they had always shared. Ellie bore responsibility, too, and it weighed heavily on her heart.
“I—I never made it easy for you,” she admitted.
Her mother sighed again and rested her head against Ellie’s arm. “If you hadn’t been so strong, you would have ended up bitter and resentful like me. I was so blinded by my own misery, I made you miserable, too. But you were so smart and so strong, you succeeded, in spite of me.”
“At what price?” Ellie whispered as her mother’s words stripped away the pretense of her own motives to succeed as a wife and mother, but most of all as a professional educator, then as department head and ultimately, perhaps, as a supervisor. She had been driven to succeed, not to please herself, but to prove she could go far and beyond the limited world she thought her mother had created for herself as a homemaker.
Ellie swallowed hard. “I was foolish, too,” she admitted. “I was so busy trying to prove I could be a better wife or a better mother or that I could have a career, as well as a family, that I forgot to love, respect and appreciate you the way a daughter should. I’m sorry. Please say you can forgive me, too. Just a little,” she said, and prayed God might also forgive her.
“Oh, Ellie…”
And then, for several minutes, they both wept cleansing, healing tears of sorrow and regret, and of love and forgiveness.
Ellie wrapped her arm around her mother’s shoulders and Ellie pressed a kiss to her cheek. “Dorothy Gibbs told me the other day that you always wanted to be a teacher,” she prompted, hoping to hear the details of her mother’s life she’d never known.
“She’s right. I always did.”
“Then why didn’t you become a teacher?”
Her mother sighed. “Life was different back then. At the time, very few young women had the opportunity for both a career and a family. We had to choose, and in my father’s house, there was no choice at all. He refused to waste a dime on college for me because he believed a woman’s place was in the home. Period. Not that I want you to think your grandfather was an ogre. He wasn’t,” she insisted. “He was just a man of his time, just as I was a woman of mine and you are of yours, which is something Reverend Fisher helped me to understand when we talked yesterday.”
Her mother sniffled, reached for a tissue and wiped away her tears. “I actually applied for a partial scholarship, but once my father got wind of it, he told me I’d better find a way to afford the rest of the tuition and have money to pay for room and board at home, too. So I got a job with Dr. Ingram, right on the avenue.”
“Where the dentist is now?” Ellie asked, to encourage her mother to continue.
“That’s right. After a few years, I’d even saved up enough money to start college, but the summer before the fall semester started, I met your father. He was here visiting his cousin for the summer.”
She stopped to clear her throat. “We were young and stupid, Ellie, but we were crazy in love. One thing led to another and…Well, you’ll find out after I’m gone, anyway, when you go through my papers…”
“Find out what?”
Her mother tensed for a moment before she answered. “We got married late in October that year. You were born six months later in April.”
Ellie stared at her mother. “Six months later? That can’t be right. You and Daddy got married a year and six months before I was born,” she argued, repeating what she had been told all her life.
“That’s what we told you when you were old enough to ask about such things. It’s why we never wanted to make a fuss about our anniversary,” her mother countered.
Ellie wanted to disagree again, until she recalled being told rather pointedly that her parents wanted absolutely no part of a huge twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party she had wanted to have for them, since they hadn’t had a big wedding.
“You were pregnant with me when you and Daddy got married,” Ellie murmured, voicing the obvious, and recognizing one more element behind her difficult relationship with her mother.
“I found out I was pregnant a week before my classes started, and we announced our engagement right away. I got fired from my job immediately, not that it mattered much. Your father and I got married in a quiet ceremony a few weeks later. When you were born, you were such a tiny little thing. You didn’t even weigh five pounds. Most folks thought you’d just arrived earlier than you should have, but I imagine there were others who suspected you were conceived before the wedding.”
She paused and twisted her hands together. “And so now you know the shame of it. I know that times have changed and there’s not much shame attached to anything today, but time can’t change the fact that a sin is a sin. Your daddy and I sinned, Ellie, but even though we both took our sin straight to God and asked Him to forgive us, neither one of us ever had the courage to tell you.”
Ellie looked down at her frail and aged mother with tenderness. “It doesn’t really matter when I was born,” she murmured, saddened that by becoming pregnant before being married, her mother had carried a heavy burden of shame for so long. The fact that her mother had been forced to get married instead of going to college to become a teacher also explained much of the resentment her mother had harbored against Ellie. “You chose life for me and you chose to get married and raise me. Not all young women who found themselves in similar circumstances would have done the same,” she insisted.
“No, they wouldn’t,” her mother replied, “but if I had truly believed then, as I do now, that God had forgiven my sin, I wouldn’t have been so jealous of you when you went off to college to live the life I’d wanted for myself.”
“I couldn’t have done that without your help,” Ellie stated. Looking back, she clearly remembered now that it was her mother, not her father, who had helped her to fill out her college applications. She reminded her mother of it now.
“I’d forgotten about that,” her mother said, gazing down at her hands.
“So had I,” Ellie admitted. “I wish I’d known then how hard it must have been for you to help me.”
“I wish I had been able to tell you, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Then the years flew by. You graduated from college, started teaching and you had your work and the students. Then you met Joe and got married, and the children came along and you had a home of your own. A real home. After you were gone and your father died, all I had left was a house filled with bitterness, disappointment and guilt, and no matter how many times I tried to decorate and redecorate that house, nothing could ever change the fact that I’d failed you most of all.”
Her mother turned and looked up at Ellie again with tear-stained cheeks. “I love you, Ellie, and I’ve always been proud of you. You’re a gifted teacher and you were a wonderful wife and mother. No matter what I’ve said or done in the past, please remember that…after I’m gone. Please.”
“Always,” Ellie promised, and held her mother tight in her arms. “As long as you remember that no matter what I might have said or done, or how upset I might have been with you, I’ve always loved you. Always,” she whispered, knowing that all they both really needed to know was that they loved one a
nother and were loved in return by their Creator.
Amen.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The day before Easter, Charlene shuffled across the lawn to the front door of Aunt Dorothy’s house, determined to carry all her packages in a single trip. Juggling five shopping bags and her purse without dropping anything, took a fair bit of energy, and she had little to spare.
After spending the last few days running Aunt Dorothy to three doctor appointments, to the lab and the pharmacy, Charlene had to squeeze all her own errands to prepare for Easter into one day—today.
She had been playing telephone tag with Ellie ever since Ellie’s mother had gone back into the hospital, but she hoped the Easter basket she had left on Ellie’s porch would brighten her holiday a bit. She doubted, however, that anyone else would appreciate receiving a basket filled with little pieces of chocolate shaped like octopuses. Unfortunately, Charlene had not been able to get a hair appointment, but she decided she would fix her hair as nicely as she could tomorrow instead of wearing a ponytail.
Overtired and eager to get inside to relax and hopefully reclaim a bit of Easter spirit, Charlene almost groaned out loud when she spied Agnes Withers heading straight for her. Keeping a smile on her face used up the last ounce of her patience, which meant she had none left to deal with whatever gossip or problem the elderly neighbor was bringing her way.
“This is great! You can save me some steps,” Mrs. Withers said as she hurried toward Charlene, carrying a small brown lunch bag. “I stopped to wish Dorothy a happy Easter while you were out, but I forgot to give her this. I even wrote myself a note,” she admitted.
While pausing to catch her breath, she looked at Charlene and frowned. “Oh, dear. You seem to have your hands full already,” she said before she stuck the bag inside one of the larger bags Charlene was carrying. “There. That should do it. Tell Dorothy I’ll call her when I get back. My son’s coming any minute to pick me up. I’m spending the holiday at his home in Lancaster,” she explained. “Happy Easter to you and that sweet husband of yours,” she said, then turned and hurried back to her house.
