by BK Loren
My mother looks toward the muddied water. Her eyes light on nothing. “I liked it better back there,” she says.
I remain standing in one spot. I don’t point again; I just watch the six or seven avocets standing steadily on their too-tall legs, their cedar heads and white bodies reflected perfectly in the shallow water that moves like mercury. My mother’s body wavers backward and forward at the waist. I had not seen this before in her, but it is there now, and it can be expected to stay. The Parkinson’s is filling her body. She looks from the water to me, and glances back toward the prettier lake, clearly put out. Whatever it was about these avocets I wanted her to see was a miscalculation on my part. I start to turn back.
But my mother’s body has suddenly stopped swaying. Her brown eyes are somehow clear again, and she is, for the first time in a long time, silent. She says, “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
I nod. She keeps her eyes on the avocets.
“Did we have to pay to get in here?” she asks.
“Mom, you were with me. You remember. Did we have to pay?”
“No,” she says. “But I don’t know why not.”
I take off my jacket and lay it on the ground, then sit down. I know Mom will remind me the ground is dirty and full of fleas, but I do it anyway. A few seconds later, though, she takes off her jacket, her dollar-twelve Ralph Lauren, and covers the ground with it. She sits next to me. I put my arm on her shoulder.
As if delivered on a screen from a slide show, the words to a poem appear in my head. I say the words almost aloud:
if I lay down tonight in
this wet field of light
would I feel the flesh
of this terrain folding over me—
a seed planted of
understanding. would I
feel the losses shrink away
before the hope of
what will already
never return haunts me.
My mother says, “Are you praying?”
I say, “Yes.”
When we get back home, she seems to have forgotten about her discount and the last sale at Joslin’s. My father is at my house—he came to visit the dogs, as he often does—and my mother starts telling a story, one she has not told him before, about our recent trip to Sea Ranch.
“We went to the lighthouse in Point Arena,” she tells him. “It’s one of the tallest lighthouses in America, 145 stairs to the top, and I climbed them all.”
She remembers this event accurately down to the last detail. “We climbed to the lens, to the part of the tower that sends light out to sea, but to get there, we had to climb these very narrow stairs. They were completely vertical.”
Her description is not an exaggeration.
My father says, “You didn’t climb them, did you, Marge?”
“Of course I climbed them.”
I nudge her. “Tell him the rest of the story, Mom.”
She cocks her head, not knowing what else of significance happened. She made it to the top, that’s all that matters to her, and so I say, “She made it to the top,” and my father smiles and nods.
But what happened after that matters worlds to me. With all the signs at the entrance of the lighthouse that warned about the difficulty of the climb, we never considered that the descent would also be difficult. My mom, who collects lighthouses, whose favorite book is To the Lighthouse, who falls asleep with a miniature lighthouse glowing in her window, was so excited about making it to the top of the lighthouse, she neglected to consider coming down. But as we turned away from the circle of unending ocean that surrounded us at the top of the light, she was faced with a narrow channel with no arm-rails and two-inch-wide iron steps that were placed one below the other in a spiral. As she turned and saw the challenge ahead, I could see the fear in her eyes. But she had no choice. She had to balance; she had to descend.
“I’ll spot you, Mom,” I said, but there was really no way to do that. “You’ll have to turn around and climb down backwards.”
My mother’s eyes froze. “I can’t do that,” she said, but then she turned around, placed her quivering foot on the first rung, and placed one foot behind the other. Without looking or holding on, she descended.
What she didn’t know was that a group of tourists were crowded in the landing, waiting to ascend to the lens. The twenty or so of them watched breathlessly as my mother’s tennis-shoe-clad feet dangled and then blindly found their way to the next step, one after the other, no handrail, no light. I was so focused in on her, I didn’t notice the crowd, either. But as my mother’s two feet finally landed on deck, the crowd broke into cheers. Several people patted her on the back. Others called out, “Good job,” and they meant it. Like her, they were caught in the moment. They could feel the tension and fear she overcame with every step. And at the end of it all, they released their breathless doubts about her ability to make it, and they cheered.
My mother smiled and lifted her face toward the sky like a victorious athlete. “You did it,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“Margie’s Discount” update: Stair number 55 in the Point Arena lighthouse now has my mother’s name engraved on it. It was a memorial gift to honor Mom given by the then-lighthouse keeper, Rae Radtkey, after she read this essay.
FIGHTING TIME
My body is mostly earth, mostly water and minerals I hold in common with other animals, the domestic dog and the beluga whale, the mountain lion and the sloth. Save for the way I love this life, the strands of days that glisten in my memory, the winglike appendages of seasons (leaf, rain, snow) that catch light and then fall to loss, the lips of my loved one that part so easily to a smile (encompass my heart), the voice of my mother, my memory of the age she once was arcing desperately to somehow comprehend the age she is now, the age she has become in the meantime, and the impending absence that awaits me, her absence (I brush it aside, until); save for the cinnamon sweet smell of a fall evening, the musty scent of grasses moist with the first snow, the days that were once round narrowing to the squint of an eye, the wink of winter closing, the light it creates within its softened darkness, and the way it breaks, eventually, to spring, trembling, as it does, in the wake of its own beauty; save for these things and the way I love them, my body is happy being earth; it can comprehend returning itself to earth, closing its eyes to this place forever just as it comprehends the day-to-day substance of living, that particular celebration that goes on quietly as the night opens and closes and the seasons barrel headlong into one another, creating the sense of roundness that makes us whole. Save for these things and the way I love them, I could go without a fight into the necessary aging, the eventual and permanent silence between us all.
FIGHTING YOUTH
There are certain memories that, over time, become like dreams, not dreams, because of their sheer palpability. You close your eyes, and they play again, the scents and sounds, the mindset you held back then, when you were younger. They are not nostalgia. They cause a certain discomfiture.
There is, for me, the time I was driving home from a week of camping in Moab, Utah. I drove at night to escape the desert’s heat, and because I liked driving at night. I liked to watch the rose-colored monoliths, their human forms rising from the desert floor like a congregation of gods.
I passed through Utah in the darkness, and by dawn I was driving through a pastoral valley in Colorado where free roaming black-and-white cows occasionally lit up in my headlights, and the black road glistened beneath their hooves. On either side of the narrow road were small, white houses. Their porch lamps were still glowing and everything was on the verge of morning. When the cows finally meandered from the middle of the road to the shoulder, my Volkswagen Beetle sputtered forward, the engine making the only sound in that quiet break of day.
I was traveling the back roads, so I figured there was little chance of finding the caffeine buzz I wanted so badly. But as I rounded a bend leading out of the small town, a white stucco
building appeared. Its walls were deeply cracked, and the screen door waved slowly open and closed, even though the air felt thick and still. The word café was hand painted in blocky, red letters that covered the entire side of one wall. Behind the café stood a huge compound of white buildings connected to another compound that was wrapped in gray ducts. A chain-link fence with DANGER, KEEP OUT signs posted on it surrounded the place. Though it was early morning, there were people moving around in there, working, and a sticky-smelling white smoke billowed from the compound’s chimneys.
With my legs trembling and bright white circles flashing behind my eyelids whenever I blinked (the effects of all-night driving), I pulled into the dirt lot and walked to the café. When I opened the door, I saw half a dozen men sitting at the counter and a pot of coffee sitting on a warmer. I said, “How much to fill this thermos?” The skinny man behind the counter turned to look at me. The skin on his face was thick and red, heavily scarred. The men at the counter turned toward me in unison. As my eyes ticked down the line of men looking at me, I saw that each one of them had a distinctive mark—a scar, an appendage missing, an ear blooming red and raw from the side of his face. They wore the white uniforms of the people who worked at the complex.
The skinny man pointed to the pot of coffee. “Sit a buck on the counter,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, and I filled my thermos, placed a dollar bill on the counter, and left.
It was a time in my life when I thought I would live forever, or when, at least, the thought of dying didn’t portend as much loss as it does now. I had yet to understand the human body as the rickety thing it is, the rib cage poised so precariously on top of the finger-thin spine, each rib bending around the vital organs like fingers of a hand folding around jewels (as if a hand could guard the value), and the legs, with their poorly engineered, wobbly knees holding the teetering weight of the torso. At nineteen, I didn’t see the way the spine arcs from one pose to the next like the stem of a delicate flower, the body designed, as it is, for beauty rather than durability. My body still felt like a force with unlimited potential. I believed I could drink that coffee, and if it was full of contaminants and toxins (which I believed it probably was) from that odd complex behind the café, so what? My body could fight things off, endlessly. My body was not susceptible. That’s what I believed. I had experienced its resilience firsthand.
Confident though I may have pretended, the picture of the men stayed with me, that sacred geometry of the human body altered so grotesquely by, I assumed, some everyday violence that had taken place in that huge plant where they all worked, their need to make a daily wage—something they couldn’t fight off. It was my first glimpse into the sheer rudeness of mortality, to see arms and legs so gruesomely altered, to see the calm acceptance on the men’s faces.
FIGHTING AGING
This is what is happening in my mother’s body and mind today. Deep within her brain is a dark nugget of matter (the substantia nigra). Its job is to create little packets of dopamine and send them out to the basal ganglia, which opens the package, reads the message, and then initiates movement in my mother’s body. The chain of command begins with my mother’s will to, let’s say, bend her legs and take a step. Instead of things going as they should, however, my mother’s will lights the fuse that runs to the substantia nigra and looks frantically for that little package of dopamine, which it does not find because that dark place in my mother’s brain is dying well before the rest of her body and mind is ready to do so. There’s a very sparse amount of dopamine available, and so the spark scavenges what it can and then, dutifully, carries the incomplete message to the basal ganglia. The result is that the leg does not move, or it moves too much, or too fast, or it spasms. In the face of this biology, there’s no such thing as “mind over matter” (my repeated motto as a teenager). There is strength of will; there is persistence, but the mind and the body are one—and in the case of my mother, this mended dichotomy is not ideal.
She was seventy-three on the day the doctor first said, “I notice a tremor in your left arm,” and began the tests that, a week later, suggested she had Parkinson’s. Now, at seventy-eight, she is homebound, her body ravaged with a disease that has twisted her once-delicate spine into something like a thick, gnarled oak. Her arms reach out for me with every step, her upper body bent forward and swaying constantly as if trying to dodge invisible blows, a perpetual movement that ends at her hips, her lower body so rigid her feet have become anvils weighted to the floor, nothing like the roots of a tree (and a fighter is nothing without nimble footwork).
She repeats her mantra to me: “They don’t even know what causes Parkinson’s. How can they know I have it?” Her reasoning is as illogical as the disease, but the first part of the equation is true. Parkinson’s is “idiopathic,” the cause, unknown. Certain causes, however, have been ruled out. In “typical” Parkinson’s (when the symptoms appear after the age of fifty) genetics are not the cause of the disease. According to an article published in the Los Angeles Times (and many other major newspapers in January of 1999), “That leaves environmental chemicals as the culprit for the vast majority of Parkinson’s . . . In announcing their results, [scientists] specifically pointed out that the search for causes of Parkinson’s should now refocus on environmental chemicals such as fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.”1
If you watched me with my mother for a day, the way I comb the hair around her face, the way I stand with my legs balanced on both sides of a bathtub rim and, with my comparatively slight body, lower her into the warm water, joking with her all the way, listening to her laughter, the way she jokes back with me until she sinks into the comfort of the bath, sighs, and I massage her scalp with shampoo, my clothes soaked from chest to ankle, my heart pounding with exertion, sadness, fear, if you saw these things, you would likely not see the rage that informs my every move.
I have pictures of the home where I was born. In one of them, my mother and father are wearing shorts and T-shirts, leaning on snow shovels, and smiling like monkeys at the camera. Their feet are swallowed to the ankle in a fine dust that drifts, graceful as snow, against the rose hedge that borders our newly landscaped, heavily fertilized yard. Behind them, you can see all the way to the front range of the Rocky Mountains. You can see the distinctive outlines of Eldorado Canyon, whose rock walls embrace one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds that blast through the canyon and, at the mouth of it, spread out and rush low across the open plains. As those winds barreled across the open plains back then, they picked up debris and the first layer of recently farmed, heavily pesticided earth, rolling it like a massive carpet until it reached our neighborhood, where it accumulated in drifts against hedges, fences, the sides of our homes. The families there, mine included, ogled the wonder of wind, the speed and power made visible in the mounds of dust we happily shoveled, like snow. The dust brought with it a real social affair. It was a reason for many families to work outside, together.
Between Eldorado Canyon and my childhood home, I cannot recall a housing development or an apartment complex, not a gas station or a Wal-Mart. It was, as I said, mostly farmland, with the occasional interruption of a few stoic industrial chimneys. They stood erect, just below the mountain horizon, rising from a complex of buildings we knew little about—except what my father, a career military man, told us. He said, driving by the complex one day, “This is the place where they make stuff for atomic bombs.” He smiled. “Right in our backyard!” He said it with such glee and importance that sometimes, as a child, I was moved to walk out into the endless, open fields behind my house and push my way through curtains of tall grass and cattails until I could see the narrow smokestacks rising, immutable as the mountains behind them. When I was six, I would stand there at attention, believing the mountains and the chimneys were equal in power and beauty.
I was looking at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, ten miles or so upwind from my backyard. The waste from that facility was a part of the dust that rolled
across the land and accumulated in our backyards. It was the dust we shoveled so merrily, content and privileged, as we were, to be able to live our day-to-day lives under the splendid Colorado sky.
These are the memories that enter my head as I bathe my mother. I run the sponge down her spine, noting the way the vertebrae bulge distinctly, like a row of garden rocks tucked just underneath her first thin layer of skin, curving this way and that, each curve cupping a mound of spasmed muscle. “I have bones sticking out of my back,” my mother says curiously. “It doesn’t feel like my spine.” She believes the hip replacement she had a few years back has floated to the surface of her body; she can feel the metal protruding, she says. I have not been able to convince her that the bone and metal she feels are her muscles, once supple and strong, made rigid as steel by the disease that inhabits her body.
I’ve grown to realize that what comes naturally is either this, or that; either the nostalgic images of my mother as a young woman working and playing in my childhood home, or the very vivid picture I see of her now: her body bent, her mind struggling to form words, her face, with the stiffness typical of Parkinson’s, trying to smile. I attempt to conjure the mother I knew only two years ago, the one who was aging gracefully, enjoying her elder years, working out at the gym, gardening, swimming with her group of lady friends who were so dedicated that they went to the outdoor pool even during the first snows of winter. On my way to visit my mother at her senior home, I sometimes see that group of ladies with their transistor radio poolside, each of them keeping the beat of the music, singing as they work out. My mother is no longer among them, and I can’t get a picture in my mind of her ever being there with them. My memory of that time has become theory.
It is, I think, my brain’s way of forcing acceptance, the present bridging to a distant, golden past with nothing in between, no direct access to yesterday or last month.
