“We Are Not Saints.”



Frances, my mother, age 18

I live a checkered life. When I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I went back to the church denomination I was born into, which happened to be Lutheran. A wonderful pastor helped me find a “new” God there, one I could sort of understand and sort of not understand but be comfortable with.

The pastor introduced me to Martin Luther, the man, not the author of the catechism I had to memorize as a kid. Luther had an idea that people of faith are a paradox: They are simultaneously both sinner and saint, screw-ups who live in a state of grace. That concept helped me find forgiveness.

I’m thinking about saints, tarnished and otherwise, because this week’s host of Poetry Jam, NanU, wants us to write about the eve of something hallowed. [Poetry Jam, eve of holy somethings] Tuesday is All Saints Day, which actually means something spiritual to me today. I live to Google, and I found a nice little essay by a Methodist pastor, Rev. Dean Snyder, on huffingtonpost.com.

“If Easter is when Christianity celebrates the resurrection of Christ [Snyder writes], All Saints' is when Christianity celebrates the resurrection of the rest of us. The focus of Easter is the victory of Jesus over death and the grave. The focus of All Saints' is resurrection and life eternal for the rest of us.

“I think it can be an act of courage to believe in eternal life and to strive to live lives consistent with this belief. It takes courage to live as though our lives matter eternally -- even if they seem to us very ordinary, even frustrating and disappointing. It takes courage to believe that our lives matter beyond this lifetime, or even the earthly memory of it, when so much of what we do seems trivial and even pointless. It takes courage to choose to do the good and just thing in terms of eternity, rather than what is easiest, even when it will cost us something in the short-term and nobody will much notice or care anyway.

“It takes courage to believe that the lives of others are eternal — that each life we intersect and those we don't have eternal meaning and value and that we have a responsibility to each other that transcends the time, place and circumstances of our present lives.”

When I think of the “eve of something holy,” I think of the three nights I sat vigil with my dying mother. Both of us started out scared. Both us found courage. She’s one of those full-blooded saints now, no longer living a checkered life. This is the poem I wrote as she lay dying.

Your Dance of the Final Days

Your chest rises and falls rhythmically, I see
glancing at the narrow bed across the room.
It is anyone’s room, a blue sea of carpet,
a drawn window shade, but here is your
cedar chest, scarred with memories. Here
is your sewing cabinet, made by your father,
its varnish worn. Here am I, in your office
chair, slash of duct tape on its vinyl seat,
its squeaky, rusty wheels. I watch you
sleep, your labored breathing drowned
by the hum and hiss of oxygen, afraid to look
away. The bedclothes might stop rising
and you slip off, me unaware, intolerable
thought. I want to see you should you slide
from the bed and do a jig across the floor.
I never saw you dance in all these years
but there’s no telling what you’ll do.
You have surprised us all before.
You surprise me now with your tenacity,
my skeletal lioness, chomping the neck
of the very last giraffe.

The Day My Mother Said Goodbye to Me

I found something wonderful in my document file today. I wrote it a year ago, after discovering my mother had been trapped in a hospital for five days without the notification of her family. When I found her there, I showed the treating physician her Advance Directive, and he promptly ordered hospice care for her (she had developed pneumonia while at the hospital) and released her back to her care home. This is what I wrote on the afternoon of her release:

Out of these five long years spent by you in the relentless grip of Alzheimer’s Disease, when mostly what I’ve known of you is summed up in “disintegration,” I want to remember how you glowed today as we made plans for your dying. Your small, dwindled self lay curled on your bed and barely rumpled the spread, but your face was beautiful, in its ancient joy to see me. You stared up at me in blue-eyed brightness, as you listened, heard, and answered in your right brain, not your wrong one. You smiled and smiled at me, and at the staff that attends your death, and over and over you said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I asked you how you felt, and you said, beaming, “It’s wonderful!” It was wonderful to have you back among the living for those few hours, after we had signed the orders to let you die. You laughed about eating ice cream for lunch, and you held my hand.

At one point you looked up at me, as I leaned over you saying something to you, and you reached up both hands and laid them softly on my face, cupping it in your hands. We smiled at each other. Were you saying goodbye, Mom? I understood your message of love, and gratitude maybe, or maybe just a cherishing of me. It made my spirit soar. I will remember this, Mom.

After Alzheimer’s destroyed you,
you had one glowing day, clear as sunshine,
when your blue eyes twinkled at me.
Your face was beautiful in its ancient joy.
You reached up and cupped my face
in your hands, smiling and studying me.
It’s wonderful you said, and I knew
what you meant.

My Mother’s New Appearance

My mother, dead five months now, surprised me by floating through my dream this predawn morning, wearing remarkable clothes she never wore in life.

In a large gathering of familiar people at a once-grand, now-tired hotel, I glimpsed her sometimes as my dream-plot unfolded. She wore flowing silks (or maybe rayon) in bright, large florals—a tunic outfit, once, as she threaded her way through the lobby to the big banquet room, and later an ankle-length dress, an updated 1920s style with a dropped waist. The dress was a few sizes too big for her little body, but she had put on a bit of weight since she died.

For the last 30 years, my mother lived in blue jeans and plain cotton blouses, never tucked in, and that’s what she was buried in. For church and special occasions, she had two pairs of trousers and a couple of dressier blouses, plus a pants suit. My mother despised dresses, and on the rare occasion when she wore one in the ’60s and ’70s, they were shapeless and ugly.

She wore an awful knee-length A-line polyester dress, in an orange and navy geometric print, for her 25th wedding anniversary celebration with my father. She sewed an undistinguished floor-length polyester dress for my evening wedding in 1977. I tried to get her into clothing that fitted her curvy shape, but she wouldn’t have any of it. I wonder if she was motivated by dislike of her body (which she had expressed to me a time or two) or simply comfort.

I smiled to see her in my dream wearing those eye-catching bold floral designs in fluid, clinging fabrics. Oddly, she accompanied a lady friend wearing the exact same clothes. The sight of the two them, dressed alike, made me pause in my dream to marvel and wonder why. But I didn’t speak to my mother until later in the plot, and then it was a curious encounter.

I had gone into my hotel room to attend to some private mission, and I noticed as I closed the door that its lock was broken. That made me uneasy, vulnerable and fearful that someone would intrude. And sure enough, my mother opened my door and stood in the doorway, wearing that ankle-length dress. Behind her in the hallway was a shadow of that companion dressed like her.

I repudiated her immediately. I didn’t know if her mind was fully restored to its pre-Alzheimer’s existence but I gave her no chance to talk. I didn’t want her to witness what I was doing. My response to her standing in my doorway was along the lines of “Excuse me! Please leave! And shut the door behind you!”

And without any ado, she turned around and went out. I noticed then that her dress, which was a pastel aqua with an enormous floral pattern, was slightly too large for her, being loose around the hips. It was an eye-catching, attractive dress, but she needed at least one size smaller.

Then I remembered she had died. I felt a little guilty for sending her out, but mostly pleased because of her clothing, and then I dismissed her from my mind because she wasn’t important to my plot.

I wonder what dreams are about sometimes. I wonder if they’re significant or simply imaginative random adventures our brains spin in sleep. Part of me wants to ask questions about the whys and wherefores of this particular dream, but the other, more influential part of me says that’s inviting paralysis by analysis. Simply enjoy the curious dream and let myself smile about my mother’s new style of clothes.

Read This or I'll Bump Off My Cat

This is the Best Thing you'll read all day, possibly all week.

So says my (biased) therapist (a New Yorker subscriber), who wants me to submit what follows (to the New Yorker). I wouldn't really bump off my cat. That was just a reference to an old postcard I have: Under a photo of a friendly-looking pooch, with a gun held to its head by someone out of frame, was this header:

Buy this or we shoot the dog.

(Sorry. I thought it was hysterical.)

What follows is a true story. To prove it to you, I took the photo above.

The Last Sliver of Soap

Here I stand in the white shower stall
warm water thrumming on my back
holding the last sliver of soap on my palm,

a thin, pink, oval broach, end piece
of the bar I salvaged 100 days ago
from my dead mother’s bath. I anoint

my body with it this one final time,
beginning the rite — unchanging rite —
of showering, raising my left arm

to salute the God I serve, raising then
my right arm to salute the strength
He gave me, rubbing the last sliver

of soap between my palms. Leg up
next, as if to step up to an altar,
honoring the march of days in a life.

With a stone’s smooth polish, soap
glides over my belly and breasts
blessing the lives they have nourished,

and in this rite I remember the day
my old mother yelled Shit! in the shower,
withered butt sagging and dignity pierced

as I and the aide conspired to cleanse her.
She hated the shower, demented but clear
that washing her body tormented her soul.

I hear her, and see her, and she is alive
as the last sliver of soap slips in my hands.
This was her brand, her ceremonial bar

night in and night out, preparing for bed,
emerging anointed, blessed be the day.
I pause in the shower to savor her then

holding what’s left of a relic of soap
the final memento I claimed from her room
the morning she died, a used bar of soap.

100 days later, the bar is a shard, last tie
to her body now buried in dirt, and she
requires no cleansing but I baptize myself

in the name of my mother, a holy bond.
The last sliver of soap in my hand is
sacred and I’ll save it, box it in velvet

tuck it away with a note, an intimate
totem of the woman she was, some earth
and a heart before God washed her away.

Play Editor, Please

I'm looking for input. Tonight I'm doing a reading of selected poems about my mother and the last months of her battle with Alzheimer's Disease. My selection needs to be reduced by two poems. Which two of these do you suggest I cut? No need to explain unless you'd like to. A simple "X and X" would be a big help. [See my note below for a tally of the votes at 5:25 p.m.]

1
Alzheimer’s Poetry
From a Line Uttered By My Mother


Oh I can smell the sound
a freesia makes in its sweet purity
It is the sound of all life has to offer
in one fragrant package of petals
It is the sound of roots growing
deeper, the sound of joy,
the smell of music swelling
on the breeze from the west

2
I Tried Laying Hands on My Mother


On the bony forehead rests a hank of hair
Cheekbones loom over a sagging chin
and a gaping slash of mouth

I brush back the thatch of white
But it falls through my fingers
I touch the knobby bones that rise
like hills above the sunken cheeks
Every movement of my hand is forced
against a tide

Suddenly I remember my daughter
at the age of five, lying on her bed
with the nightlight on. Her eyelashes
make little wings on her cheeks
I draw on her soft face with a finger
and I sing a monotonous song:
I’m skiing down your nose and skiing
round your mouth …I’m skiing round
your cheeks and up around your eyeballs

She lies still as a statue
while my fingertip skis over her face
and I love it, she loves it, she asks
for this. And this I can’t give
to my mother, lying still as a statue
on her bed. My hand will not allow it.

3
Mom Says Goodbye


After Alzheimer’s destroyed you,
you had one glowing day, clear as sunshine,
when your blue eyes twinkled at me.
Your face was beautiful in its ancient joy.
You reached up and cupped my face
in your hands, smiling as you studied me.
It’s wonderful, you said, and I knew
what you meant.

4
Inevitability


For a moment before
I asked you what was wrong
a sensation of otherness
swept through my blood
and my hand rose to stop
the words. Call it intuition,
that odd foreknowledge
of my life about to break
in half.
But my hand stopped
midway to my mouth
and the words tumbled out.
Why? Was I suddenly brave?
If so, courage deserted me
when I saw your head begin
to turn and your mouth moving.
A suitcase swam through the air
on flippers like a seal,
caught you on your forehead
and knocked you to the floor.
It swam out the open window
and I never saw it again
although I called and called

5
Your Dance of the Final Days


Your chest rises and falls rhythmically, I see
glancing at the narrow bed across the room.
It is anyone’s room, a blue sea of carpet,
a drawn window shade, but here is your old
cedar chest, scarred by the memories inside.
Here is your plywood sewing cabinet,
crafted by your father, its varnish worn.
Here I sit in your squeaky office chair
with the slash of duct tape on its vinyl seat
and its rusty chrome wheels. I watch you
sleep, your labored breathing drowned
by the hum and hiss of oxygen, afraid to look
away. The bedclothes might stop rising
and you slip off, me unaware, intolerable
thought. I want to see you should you slide
from the bed and do a jig across the floor.
I never saw you dance in all these years
but there’s no telling what you’ll do.
You have surprised us all before.
You surprise me now with your tenacity
my skeletal lioness, chomping the neck
of the very last giraffe.

6
DNR
“Do Not Resuscitate”


When you left, you took
my vital signs with you
and I arrived at the rest
of my life without a pulse.

7
Pneumonia Sucks


1 a.m.
fever rising
chills
rattle my bones
rolling, moaning
lungs gasp
like broken bellows
no one knows
I crouch here
on the couch
everyone sleeps
safe, secure
like they were
last week while
you and I
fought for your death
three long nights
days that bled
into each other
strange I should
fight to breathe now
as if my lungs
sympathize
with yours
they re-enact
your last act
but I realize
how much I gave you
simply being
awake

8
In the End


The ocean’s gray furrowed brow
reminds me of my brother’s face
when he turned to look unseeing
through her window
the day our mother died

Something marched across his face
in regimental rows, something quiet
but relentless, a failing general
reviewing his troops in calm despair
before that final, inevitable loss.

_________________

Thank you so much for considering my question and writing such thoughtful replies.

I don't know how other poets know when they've found the words and images that give a reader the experience that matters most to me: that sense of having participated in something so powerful, they feel it, and they feel it within the context of their own lives.

I don't know what happens in your head when you read my poems. I don't how to find out except to put it out there and ask. You've been generous with your time, and I'm grateful. You told me what I asked to know. See comments for the vote.

Mourning Is Electric

A complete stranger, during a business call on Wednesday, became an articulate and insightful grief counselor who had lost her own mother a few years ago. "It's a life-shifting event," she told me. "Lean into the pain. Let it out, whether it be a whimper or a sob fest."

I’m doing well, I think. Sad for me, happy for my mom, full of memories good and bad, feeling like an orphan, being businesslike in attending to Mom’s estate, juggling everything at a time when I feel oddly weak and incapable. Following in that stranger's footsteps, my daughters and I held a wonderful ceremonial gathering at the ocean in memory of our mother and grandmother.

I took an armful of my garden flowers. We went to a beach where my mother and father used to take my brothers and me.

One by one we took a flower and thought of some wonderful thing embodied by my mother when she was younger, before the Alzheimer's took her away from us. Then we threw the flower into the sea.

It was a powerfully lovely thing to do.

Mom seemed very near, free at last and whole again.

Pneumonia Sucks

Last night, the pneumonia turned mean.

We had the family over for supper. While a group of us had gone to see “Despicable Me” with my little nephew Jacob, hubby Joe stayed home to make his olive and cheese enchiladas and Spanish rice. It’s a popular meal with our crew.
The get-togethers are good. We’ve gathered every day since Mom died on Wednesday. For once, I didn’t care about the dust in the corners. But I felt so puny, I trundled off to bed right after supper.

Within an hour, the fever hit, with chills, aching bones, rapid and shallow breathing, plus a bunch of dramatic moaning and groaning. This went on for hours. I made a deal with myself: If the fever went over 102 degrees F, I’d go to the ER again like the paperwork from my Thursday evening visit told me to. By 2 a.m. it hadn’t done so, and the chills and pain were beginning to lessen. I got some sleep after that.

My brothers and I met Sunday afternoon to decide what we had to do next to take care of Mom’s business. Then the out-of-town family went home and I went to bed.
It has been a week since I found my mother in dire straits, and the vigil began. Everything we could do to make her passing easier, we did do. She was not left alone. She had me all through the long nights, even when it was terribly painful to bear. That gives me the gift of peace
Today would have been my parents’ 59th wedding anniversary. I’m sure Mom and Dad are celebrating it in heaven.

I’m going to hitch a ride on the Totalfeckineejit’s Poetry Bus today, driven by Jeanne of Revolutionary Revelry. She gives us three options, one of which is to partake of her recipe for Mint Julep Iced Tea and then write whatever is on our minds. Here’s my offering:

Pneumonia Sucks

1 a.m.
fever rising
chills
rattle my bones
rolling, moaning
lungs gasp
like broken bellows
no one knows
I crouch here
on the couch
everyone sleeps
safe, secure
like they were
last week while
you and I
fought for your death
three long nights
days that bled
into each other
strange I should
fight to breathe
now as if my lungs
sympathize with
yours, they re-enact
your last act
but I realize
how much I gave you
simply being
awake

I Buried Mom in Blue Jeans

My mother had two dresses at one point. One was an orange paisley polyester affair, The other was a floor-length wonder in pale blue polyester, which she made for one of her kids' weddings. I don't think she took it out of the closet since 1977.

We're burying her this morning at the cemetery where her parents and brothers lie. I realized on the way to the mortuary Wednesday that I hadn't brought anything for her to wear. So on the street in front of the funeral home, I rummaged through my trunk and found an old pair of her Wranglers and a chirpy blouse. She lived in blue jeans. The choice made me happy.

I am so grateful for your outpouring of blessings the past couple of days. Every one of you has lifted my spirits. I think I needed those prayers more than I realized. Yesterday after Mom's funeral service, I wound up in the emergency room unable to breathe and diagnosed with pneumonia. I got home, got comfy, and read your comments again. I feel surrounded by peace.

Here is the second-to-last poem I wrote for Mom:

My Mother’s Traveling Wardrobe


Since the FBI gave my mother the boot
four months ago, her wardrobe travels
in the boot of my car. The agents
put her caregivers in the pokey
for trafficking in humans, so
her blouses and pants steer through
traffic with me. G-Men made her
homeless at 79, demented and frail,
but I’ve given her clothes a home
in my trunk. They go where I go,
like Ruth wheeling after Naomi
crying Wither thou goest, I shall go!
Resting comfortably in the back of my car,
they cover the miles instead of her back.

As she vanishes within, her clothes
travel without, cavorting through
the countryside. She grows
more still with each passing day
but her wardrobe’s in motion
smelling strongly of her. Particles
of my mother waft into the car,
assemble on the passenger seat
and rub along jolly as rubber balls
bouncing down the road.

My Mother Hits the Promised Land

To the very end, my mom does things her own way. She spent these past three days getting shed of the mortal body. I was there for most of it, and I used all my spiritual tools to endure.

Trying to care for my mother as she slowly died was the hardest thing I have EVER done. She was a stubborn Norweigian to the end, with a stout heart that didn't want to quit. I told her a hundred times that she was free to go, but she went when she was dam good and ready. She did pay attention to my request that she go on my watch, in the wee hours this morning, and I am thankful.

The photo I've posted here was taken of my mom 18 years ago. We had a wonderful life together. Today I'm working on remembering the good years instead of my final vision of her. Thank you all for your wonderful prayers and thoughts. You made it easier for me.

Here is my last poem about her journey, I think, written during the past couple of nights as she lay dying.

Your Dance of the Final Days


Your chest rises and falls rhythmically, I see
glancing at the narrow bed across the room.
It is anyone’s room, a blue sea of carpet,
a drawn window shade, but here is your old
cedar chest, scarred by memories inside it.
Here is your plywood sewing cabinet,
crafted by your father, its varnish worn.
Here I sit in your squeaky office chair
with the slash of duct tape on its vinyl seat
and its rusty chrome wheels. I watch you
sleep, your labored breathing drowned
by the hum and hiss of oxygen, afraid to look
away. The bedclothes might stop rising
and you slip off, me unaware, intolerable
thought. I want to see you should you slide
from bed and do a jig across the floor.
I never saw you dance in all these years
but there’s no telling what you’ll do.
You have surprised us all before.
You surprise me now with your tenacity
you skeletal lioness, chomping the neck
of the very last giraffe.

My Mother's Swan Song

My mother is dancing her last dance. I'm off line, holding her hand. Please keep her in your prayers. Her name is Frances.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Unkers

(Curlews and avocets on the Pacific shore)

My eldest daughter leaves today. I've seen her only a handful of times during her life, once briefly as a newborn, then later in her early twenties since we've reunited. She has been here for a two-week visit during her summer vacation, and now she's off for a trek through Southern California and possibly a meeting with her birth father.

(Annika in hiking mode)

I had hoped, when I started this blog last year, to meet other birth mothers and talk with them about the profound experience of relinquishing a child. In the past 25 years I've been able to share my birth-mother story with several adopted people, but not with anyone who knows what it's like to give up a child. This past year, I did meet a birth mother who reunited with her grown son, and that conversation via email was glorious.

When Annika and I get together, it's an ongoing process of discovery. We compare our toes, our thoughts, our personalities, our histories. We find points of contact and points of divergence. She gets to know her extended birth family and her roots. I get to know her. We stay up late most nights with our mutual fascination. I'm proud of her, and she's glad I'm one of her moms. It's a strange and beautiful relationship.

(View of Morro Rock in Morro Bay, California)

(The coast in Montana de Oro State Park)

She helped me with the Totalfeckineejit's Poetry Bus assignment this week. I've been collecting word verifications for a while now, intending to use them as my prompt next week when it's my turn to drive the Bus. But I've been preempted. NanU the Science Girl Traveler has challenged the Bus riders this week to write a poem in the odd language of word verification. So I gave Annika my list and she chose the words for me to use. It was a blast to invent subjects, verbs, and predicates out of words like slitter, coblego, and yeliale. You will find other creations here.

The Swan Song

Remonia sang
and lifted high her jugaries
to the god of Puronomb.
She beseeched him to relent
to withdraw the brilb
tormenting broken unkers
in her town. Down
slittered birds, weaving
wheapsins in the air.
Where yeliales flew
now harmelas drew
their final breath.
Remonia sonemt sadly,
marking how coatina
was the sky,
and her last coblego
echoed as the god
drew nigh.

(The coastal range, central California)

Riding the Rails with Mom

“I see the train,” said my mother, touching her walker.
“It sure keeps you moving, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Yes,” she answered, looking up at me in surprise, “it does.”

My daughter and I visited Mom on Sunday morning. She had a glow, said my daughter afterward, when we found her in the dining area with the other elders. She had a sprig of jasmine tucked behind her ear.

We went outside with her to the padded chairs under the umbrella. Mom wasn’t feeling very communicative, and she played with the woven end of her belt while I told her all the news I could think of. When I stopped talking, there was a silence, and then she said that thing about the train. Maybe she was just waiting for me to shut up. A little later she said, “It’s sad about the trees.”

I don’t know for sure what she meant, but last winter she was concerned about the leafless trees. She thought they were dying because she had forgotten about seasons. So I told her, “But the trees came back! We had lots of rain. They’re doing well now.” I smiled at her. She said, “Oh, yes,” and smiled back.

The activity girls came out and asked if we would like to go to Sunday devotions and singing in the big room. We took the long walk down to it, me leading with my hand lightly resting on Mom’s train, and Milo playing Caboose.

The girls handed out the words to some great old hymns and started the CD. I gave the folder to Mom, and she held it steadily in front of her while I pointed out the words and sang them as loudly as I could. A friendly lady with a spectacular voice sat beside us. Between the songs, she told me that she had five grandchildren. Each time was brand new again.

Mom didn’t smile but she seemed to take pleasure in the music. It was lovely, looking at and listening to the elders, some nodding, some singing, some just sitting patiently. The girls read one of Psalms, and then we said the Lord’s Prayer. Mom didn’t speak it. When it was over we sat waiting for our turn to be taken back to Mom’s “neighborhood.” One of the girls came over and thanked us for coming. I asked her if she had seen “Benjamin Button.” “This is like that,” I said. She said yes it was.

I told my daughter as we walked back, “This is like preschool too.” Milo said, “It’s sad.”

When we got ready to go, I told Mom I loved her. “I love you too,” she said and kissed me. Milo said, “I love you, Grandma,” and Mom said, “I love you too.” Milo put her cheek next to her grandma. “Give me a kiss, Grandma.” And Grandma kissed her cheek.

They age backward, I told Milo when we went to the car. They lose their abilities in the same order they gained them. I think my mom is about two years old now. It’s just like the “Benjamin Button” film, I said again because it has been on my mind. It’s really sweet. “I’m glad I went to see her,” Milo said. “It’s nice to know she knows who I am.”

And it’s nice to know she knows she is loved.

~~~~~~

My Poetry Bus friends: If you'd like to hear me reading a poem about the significance of one's name, click this link, wait patiently for the file to download, then go to 7:21 and listen until 8:21.

http://kcbx.org/mp3archive/eoa091202.mp3

~~~~~~

Learning About Dying

We’re taking Mom home to her room at the care home today. She’s been such a great gal in the hospital, by all staff accounts from the long weekend before we knew she was there, and by my own experience Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Wednesday, she actually called me by my name for the first time in a couple of months, she recognized her sister, and she said to me, "That's a big smile." She spit her medication at the nurse this morning, and this afternoon she nicely told the pretty young doctor, "You have a nasty nose."
She meant to say, "You have a pretty face," because that's what she has always said to young women since getting dementia. But she gave us a good laugh.

I’ve learned an awful lot about dying this week. I’ve learned what the physical process is, how the body and the person living in it prepare it to stop functioning. I’ve learned how death often comes, the sounds it creates, how hearing is the last sense to go, why Mom’s legs and hands are so cool to the touch (even the bloodstream knows what to do and where to send the remaining energy).

Hunger and thirst go away, as they seem to be doing in Mom, an instinct that naturally reduces the strain on the body’s organs (like the gastro-intestinal tract), which are growing weaker. It appears also to be more comfortable and relieves the person of several potential conditions that would be distressing, like fluid buildup in the throat or lungs, having to poop or pee and not being able to, etc.

What stands out for me is how well organized it seems to be. The brain might be shrinking and disintegrating, but it remains a good director, as if God designed it that way.

When a person can no longer say more than six words in a row, the brain stops controlling the swallow reflex and the involuntary muscles involved. The person then can’t swallow. But that doesn’t matter, because hunger and thirst have disappeared. Starvation and dehydration develop next, and they seem to anesthetize nerves that conduct pain messages. Hospice knows how to relieve any discomfort that arises out of the process.

I’m thankful to God for my mother’s long life. She wasn’t perfect, but she was human, and the Almighty gave me lots of good years with her.
I’m so glad my mother left an Advance Directive and made her wishes known every which way but loose. That makes it so simple: just do what I know she would do. (She would jump out of bed and run naked through the streets if that would get her to heaven sooner.)

Cuss Words and So On

~~~~

The parents’ lessons linger long:
Anything worth doing is worth doing well
Put your back into it, girl
You knucklehead! You numbskull!
Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about
You’d gripe if you was hung with a new rope
And worst of all:
Shingamucka-high-lo!
Which meant the sky was going to fall.


This is a Friday Flash 55. If you want to tell a story in exactly 55 words, post it and go tell the host with the most, the G-Man.

I’m sure my parents said some fine things about life, aside from that one gem about “Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” but what I remember today is the more colorful stuff.
Some of it was funny, and some of it was hard.

From the get-go, doing what we were told without complaint was the order of the day. Punishment was swift and corporal otherwise. If I cried afterward, I got that awful “Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about.” I hated that one. It was demeaning.
But I grew up to be a good worker and not a whiner.

My dad was the source of the colorful life lessons. Although he liked to call his kids knuckleheads and numbskulls, which isn’t nice, he also criticized with a home-grown humor. He was the one who said, “You’d gripe if you was hung with a new rope” and “Watch out or you'll trip over that lower lip.” Another favorite is “You got champagne tastes on a beer budget.”

He once told us solemn youngsters, “Do what your mother says. If she says, ‘Shit!’ you say, ‘Where and how much?’” I actually said that to my mother the next time I heard her say, “Shit!” I got in big trouble.

(To tell the honest truth, I had to take the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous before I could let all this trauma lie peacefully in the past. It also helped that I grew up.)

Dad walked jauntily and carried a big belt. Mom had a sharp tongue and a temper. She was a slammer of cupboard doors. On the other hand, she was also the source of the funniest cuss word I’ve ever heard.

I think she made up that word “Shingamucka-high-lo!” (which I present to you phonetically since I have no idea how it would be spelled). It always had an exclamation point behind it, and it expressed either shock, contempt, dismay, or surprised anger over a bad thing. I find myself using it these days to express the same reactions.

Has anyone out there ever heard the word “Shingamucka-high-lo!” in any form whatsoever?

I ask in earnest because a) It would be cool if Mom made up a word, and b) my first husband used to say something that sounded like “I chi notay pin chay cab rhone!” when he hurt himself, and then I started using it too (thinking it was a Japanese cuss word from his navy years) until I married my beloved Joe, who is fluent in Spanish, and he informed me it was a nasty insult that mustn’t be used in any context except a street fight, and then only if I wanted my butt kicked.

Singamuckahighlo!

~~~~~

No Poetry Today

My daughter Milo and me at the beach

I went to see my mother today at the Alzheimer's care facility and I think she knew me, although I'm not certain. She seemed dazed.

I heard little in the way of Alzheimer's poetry from her today. For the poet in her mind, it was not a good day. She did say, "I'm slower than dirt." This is a new twist on the long-standing family joke that whatever dinner we had just partaken was "Better than eating dirt." But it was true. She was slower than dirt today.

She looked down at the flower bed as she inched her way in the walker from the patio to her room, and she said very clearly, "Yes, it's a mushroom." I went over and looked. There was a flowering plant with some bark ground cover around it. I said, "It IS a mushroom, Mom." I smiled at her. She smiled back.

Smiles are good. I love the smiles in the photo above, taken by my kid as a self-portrait when we all went to the coast last weekend. Sorry she cut herself out of it.

But here's a photo of her, so you can see how beautiful she is.

And this is what the Pacific Ocean looked like on the central coast of California last weekend. Milo is playing "Run from the Waves" with our four-year-old Jacob.

So what can make you smile when you're caught in a hard place?

How do we find happiness? My mother’s last pearls

It’s funny how your parents get smarter after you’ve left home and become a parent yourself.
My young adult daughter believes I was a personal friend of the dinosaurs. I believe she needs my input more than ever. This disparity often drives me to my own mother for advice.
At 78 and shrinking, Mom is a gnome of a lady who can’t walk without pain and a cane. For most of my life she was a busy Norwegian in blue jeans who knew more about hardware than many men, strong and wiry, an expert in an arcane craft: handmade cooler pads.
Now confined to an assisted-living home, her insights are edged with mercy, a quality I think we all could use more of. I wish my daughter would sit at her grandmother’s feet and learn a little there.
But alas! The young are too busy making their own mistakes to value the wisdom of the old, who have made theirs already and grown wiser for it. Someday my daughter might wish to know what her grandmother knew about life, and it will be too late.
So I took my pen and paper and sat at my mother’s knee. What do we need to do to be happy? I asked. She laughed. Seriously, I said. For a few minutes, she communed with the oak tree arching over our heads, and then she dropped five pearls in my lap.

Have a smile for everyone!
I took my mother to a craft fair recently. Something in a booth caught our eyes, so we wandered that way and handled the merchandise. Her exclamations of pleasure and enthusiasm drew others to the stall, and Mom exclaimed over their beautiful eyes, their wonderful sweaters, their lovely hair. She had to hug them all.
In this way we made our slow way around the room. Women approached her and asked, “Will you come to my booth? You’re a people magnet, and I need business at my stall.”
On the drive home, Mom heaved a great sigh. “What a wonderful time!” she said. That is the consequence of a smile.

Listen to children and nature.
Mom can’t get out into the world under her own steam anymore, but she’s busy watching it from her windows, which overlook a field on one side and busy family street on the other.
Listening to children at play, she says, gives you an insight into what they’re thinking. Children innately forgive and forget. Listen to the congregation at the monkey bars, and your faith in the future of mankind might be restored.
Observing the world at her doorstep provides a daily ration of food for the soul, claims my mother. Emerson said the sky is the daily bread of the eyes. Mom is a little more down to earth. “It’s thrilling to hear the songs of birds, the breeze rustling the leaves,” she says. “It means I’m still alive!”

Take care of what you have.
Ordinary things, well cared for, become the treasures of your children’s children. My mother points to a well-used pitcher on a shelf. “It was my mother’s,” she explains. “It’s not valuable, but I like to look at it and remember the iced tea she made on hot days.”
If we are forever replacing with the new, she wonders, what chance have our children to make such sentimental attachments to our simple, well-used things?
It is not only things. This same woman insisted, when we were young campers in national forests, that we police our campsites before leaving. “Leave it better than we found it,” she’d say, to our annoyance. Today, when we pull into sites littered with human laziness, I wish all campers followed her rules.
The work of a person’s hands also matters to this woman, who drilled her children in their chores. Paraphrasing Lord Chesterfield without knowing it— “Any job worth doing is worth doing well!”—she would demonstrate the proper way to push a broom or clean a surface.
Imagine a world in which people cared for their environment, possessions, towns and children with that dictum foremost in their minds!

Put the best construction on everything.
One day I stood at the sink scrubbing furiously on an old Revere ware pot my husband had burned dry when he got sidetracked by the dogs. I was furious because it had been a wedding gift to my mother, passed down to me. I wished to confront my spouse with this sin against my heritage.
Mom sat at the counter, so I bemoaned the pot’s fate to her.
“Oh, that old kettle!” she laughed. “Just cook in it! It will be fine!”
My mother, the guru. As Ben Franklin said, “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do.”
The Eighth Commandment teaches us how to live at peace in a community: by bridling our tongues. My mother, a good Lutheran, quotes Martin Luther’s explanation of this command, which boils down to viewing your neighbor with kind eyes. This way mercy lies, and tolerance, and harmony with others.

Give your time to others.
“The best way to enrich your life,” Mom says, “is to give your time to people.”
Teddy Roosevelt, a president she admires, once declared, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” My mother takes this to heart—literally.
“I have universal blood!” says this proud blood donor, who has traveled painfully by walker in these later years to donate her pints of O.
No longer able to function with advancing dementia, my mother makes quilts for people in distress. She helps a local nonprofit agency prepare mailings. She makes lists of organizations that need volunteers, in the event that she suddenly can work again. I find this heroic.
“The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others,” said Helen Keller, another hero, “will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves. … Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.”

Chris Alba (c) 2009