Anyone Can Whistle

The day my mother, age 92, forgot how to whistle a lot of things changed for us both. The birds were singing and she didwhat she’s done for the better part of a century and whistled back, only shedidn’t. She did as Lauren Bacall once instructed Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, "You just put your lips together and blow." Nothing happened.

“What the Hell,” she sputtered. “Where’s my whistle?”

We both laughed until she tried again and out came the same thready hissing that most children make when trying to learn the skill. The harder she tried the more panicked she became because she’s been racking up sudden losses of function and this was one too many.

Mom’s a retired fashion designer who lived and worked in Manhattan after putting herself through the Parsons School of Design.

Until three months ago she was living independently in her little home on the New Jersey Shore where there was no need for any aid. She put the fierce into fiercely independent.

Now she’s here living here in Virginia with me as her caregiver because she woke one morning and collapsed to thefloor after her right leg stopped supporting her.

A flurry of x-rays and CTscans showed there was nothing physically wrong with her from the neck down, but she ended up in a rehab facility for a week where they made it clear she wassuddenly an invalid with no explanation as to why.

I brought her here where the doctorhere ordered an MRI which revealed that it wasn’t a stroke as some might assume, but a meningioma, a non-cancerous, tiny tumor on the membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord that continues to ravage her abilities to walk, talk, be continent, remember, hear and generally function. There are no treatments recommended at this age and stage.

Meningiomas occurmore commonly in women and are often discovered at older ages, but can happen at any age and are often hereditary, which is why I’m scheduled for an MRI later this month.

That tiny collection of cells just under 2cm in diameter has reduced her to using a walker, the vast majority of her memory wiped to the retention/attention span of the briefest TikTok video.

All that she could bear as long as she retained her ability to whistle along with songs, birds and anything else. As a kid, I found it maddening because I loved to sing and she would whistle along as I did.

Yet here I sat getting my childhood wish that she would just stop whistling and being horrified by what that loss means to her.

Her frustration, anger and panic gave way to tears and in that moment I did exactly the same thing I do when children come to visit my home and want to whistle like their older siblings.

I ran into the house and grabbed a neon-yellow plastic whistle shaped like a bird called a Water Warbler, dunked it into a glass of water and told her, “Just put your two lips together on the stem and blow.”She gave me the mother-of-all-side eye but did it.

Out came the jaunty ‘whistle” of a small bird. I dipped my fingers in the cup of water used to dunk the bird, flicked some in her direction, “There. Found your whistle after all.”

“But what if I lose my whistle again,” she asked in a way that mean much more than a whistle was in the balance.

I decided to sing her a song from the first solo I sang as a kid, “Anyone can whistle,” by Stephen Sondheim.

“Anyone can whistle, that's what they say-easy. Anyone can whistle, any old day-easy. It's all so simple. Relax, let go, let fly. So someone tell me, why can't I? I can dance a tango, I can read Greek - easy. I can slay a dragon, any old week-easy. What's hard is simple. What's natural comes hard. Maybe you could show me how to let go, Lower my guard, Learn to be free. Maybe if you whistle, Whistle for me.” 

She smiled, remembering for a moment.

“How do we keep this up,” she said in a rare moment of clarity. “You can’t make everything better."

I dunked the bird into the water and handed it back to her, “Blow into the bird’s butt and we’ll worry about that later.”