For the past ten years of my life, "Job One" for me has been keeping my mother alive. A few weeks ago, Mom had a sudden and massive cerebral hemorrhage — a stroke — and after lingering in a coma for a week, passed away. In addition to losing someone who was possibly my best friend, I lost my raison d'être, and it's been a difficult transition for me. I'm absorbing it in phases, as most who have lost a loved one will do. During all my years of caring for her, the most important lesson she taught me is that you can always bear what's put before you, and that lesson has helped me realize I'll get past my sorrow, given time.
Mom had a lot of problems. She was an insulin-dependent diabetic, and as a result of that disease, was blind. Her kidneys also failed, and after many years on dialysis for three 4-hour treatments each week, she received a kidney transplant in the summer of 1999. While the kidney transplant transformed her life, it brought new challenges, too.
In order to keep her body from rejecting her new kidney, Mom began a course of steroids and immunosuppressants, along with her regular medications. These drugs, in effect, left her in a situation somewhat akin to self-inflicted AIDS. Within a few years of her transplant, she could no longer live alone and moved in with me.
I won't bore you here with the long list of illnesses brought on by any imbalance in her multiple medical conditions. Suffice it to say she was frequently ill in the years since 1999, and that in her forbearance of all these infirmities, she taught me a great deal about what a human being can endure — and in fact, rise above.
The grace with which she accepted each new physical insult wasn't the only lesson her illnesses taught me. As her caregiver, I found myself panicking every time I had to provide a new level of care. I can't do this, I'd think, and then I'd realize I was the only one who could. I got the equivalent of a nursing degree caring for her through all of her ailments — and learned a lot about myself in the process.
But these weren't the first lessons Mom taught me.
When I was young, our family lived in a very rural location, on a dirt road so little used that grass grew in the middle of it in the summer. There were no neighbors, no playgrounds, no activities. Dad worked two jobs (sometimes three) to keep the family going while Mom stayed home with my little brother and me. I can remember Mom teaching me to draw, and when I got bored with that, reading to me from a three-foot-high stack of kid books I nagged her to add to, whenever she went into town. When we couldn't afford new books, she'd alter the old ones — changing a name, the gender of one of the characters, or the problems they confronted — so they sounded like new ones.
As I grew older, she taught me to read and write, months before I was to start school. When I started the first grade (we had no kindergarten), I was already way ahead of my classmates. While they learned to print, I pestered the teacher to show me how to write in cursive.
To amuse myself at home, I began writing and drawing my own stories, usually derivative of what we were reading in school or whatever I'd seen on my grandmother's television. I was one of those kids that had to be chased out of the house to play in the fresh air. As soon as possible, I'd be back in the house, reading stories, or writing and drawing stories of my own.
My love of reading and writing was nurtured then, and it has stayed with me through these past decades. I have Mom to thank for that.
In recent years, as her condition deteriorated, we all saw Mom losing abilities, one by one until at the end, virtually all she could do was sit or lie on the living room sofa, listening to the radio or television and discussing the news of the day. She retained her mental acuity until the end, although she could no longer read or write or get around independently.
When the time came to plan Mom's services, the funeral director asked if there was something in particular that we would like to read or have read. I knew instantly that I did.
I had been writing since childhood, but had not given much thought to writing seriously until I saw an e-mail advertisement for Pamelyn Casto's Suddenly Flash Fiction workshop in 2000. I joined her class in 2001, and on a cold winter morning wrote my first serious short story, entitled "Hoarfrost," which included Mom as a character.
Encouraged by the comments of my classmates, I submitted that story to Mindprints, a literary journal from Alan Hancock College in California. To my amazement, it was selected for publication — my very first publication credit.
"Hoarfrost" was the reading I selected for my mother's funeral. The story begins with the narrator's reminiscences about the winters of her childhood, memories of her mother, who took her out to play in the snow. It ends with the revelation of the mother's blindness and the daughter's dread of inheriting the same condition. (In case you're curious, I've reprinted it below this column.)
What I intended was for the mourners to see Mom as my brother and I had seen her — as more of a playmate than an authority figure. Judging from the weeping I heard while I was reading, I think I hit the mark.
This is the power of the written word — to evoke a memory, a feeling, a smell, a sight, a sound, or in this case, a memory of a person who has passed, and to bring it back to the reader. My mother taught me this, too, and for this gift, I will always be grateful.
Hoarfrost
It's not the light through my window that arrests me. It's the scene outside. Strong midwinter sun, dazzling on the clean snow, making vivid shadows for the naked trees. I take my time, drinking in all of the details. I want to make sure I can remember what this looked like.
When I first sat down here early this morning, the bottom of my window was frosted in one of the lovely patterns ice forms from the moisture trapped between the panes, and everything visible outside my window was coated in hoarfrost. That's the winter entertainment on the Hudson River.
On the mornings when it's truly cold — below zero — I take a different route to work than the one I normally navigate, one that takes me south along the river's edge for 15 miles or so. This takes approximately twice as long as my normal trip, but in those spots where the river's open, huge plumes of steam rise up from it, and the hoarfrost in these places is absolutely spectacular, glittering in the sun and making the bare tree limbs achingly beautiful.
Ordinarily, I don't have the patience for this commute. It's slower and more congested, and doesn't spare me the consciousness I need to plan out the day ahead or chew on a solution to my latest personal dilemma. But on mornings like these, the wonders on display supercede anything I may need to consider.
I remember mornings like this from my early childhood, when my mother would take me outside, belt me to a Flexible Flyer and pull me down the road to the mailbox. I remember my nostrils sticking together, the stinging of my cheeks in the cold air, and the itch of the wooly scarf tied around my neck. I remember being so bundled up in heavy winter clothing that it was difficult to move; I remember my mother's good-natured laughter as I tried to walk clumsily back into the house.
I will miss the small moments like the view out my window this morning the most, I think, when my gift of eyesight is gone at last. Yesterday afternoon my doctor told me that I was beginning to lose my vision to complications of diabetes, as my mother and grandmother did before me. I'll have to remember to ask my mother this afternoon if she can still recall in her mind's eye the things she can no longer see.