Walking Mother Home

The rumble of the excavator shakes the decking where I stand. In front of me, trees fall in seemingly slow motion, sleepy giants hitting the ground with a force that I feel in my own chest as if it were I who had fallen. My face is wet with tears, but I can't stop grinning. I feel gratitude swell through me more poignantly than I can ever recall.

I clutch a small black notebook, press it to my lips, then over my heart with two hands, like a cartoon. This, this day, it's all in there, all the words, scribed neatly on some days, scrawled and near illegible on others. Hundreds of words. Thousands maybe. Yes. Thousands...definitely thousands. Words of visioning. Words of gratitude. Pages and pages of words. I have literally written this day into being!

The journey to today began a decade ago. The slow tearing away of our mother from the fabric of our family. A small thing forgotten, a tiny untruth passed as fact, a growing recklessness, a hint of fear behind her jade green eyes; the early signs of memory loss. She had watched her own mother, my grandmother, die from Alzheimer's and she had never wanted to follow her. She didn't want to "be a problem"...but here we are. Her life was not set up for this imposed dependancy. Living on the ranch, no human life for miles, the roads impassable for months at a time; she and Dad had thrived there for 60 years. Not now though, not like this, frail and forgetful and locked away inside the holes that this disease has punched through her brain.

The forgetting is not the worst. She forgot that she smoked...(thank God!), forgot that she liked a nip of whiskey in her monogrammed teal coffee mug, she even forgot about her pot of black boiled coffee. As the forgetting took her vices it also took her cough, the dryness from her mouth, the reflux from her stomach, and much of the arthritic pain from her joints, a veritable Grimms Fairytale of curses and blessings. No, the forgetting is not the worst, it's the cracks of remembering that tear and scratch.

Remembering comes unexpectedly. A paintbrush in a drawer, a side road once travelled, a sign outside the Peavey Mart hardware store, the smell of fried onions; improbable keys to unhinged doors that briefly swing wide and taunt her with a glimpse of who she was. Artist, chef, lover, rancher, mother, the many roles she played so competently, now locked away in a heartbreaking helplessness. In these moments her anguish is palpable, it breaches her blankness and spills from the rims of her eyes. She covers her face with her knobby, papery hands and makes a sound so born of desperation and horror that I press my own hands against my heart to shield it from the agony. I try to talk her back to the abyss.

"You're remembering aren't you?"

She nods, a full body nod, rocking in her torment and I reach to touch her, to bring her back to the serenity of forgetting.

"We remember who you are Mom. We remember your paintings. We remember that chocolate pudding you make in the oven. We remember how you love driving and music with a loud thudding base. You are safe in our memories. We won't forget you."

Slowly the tears and the rocking and those horrible sounds of remembering stop and she slumps back in her seat and sinks back into the empty places.

On good days I can tell she is engaged, that she is aware and enjoying the family banter and babble that weaves around her. A spark of something rises up through her, but without support from her cerebral cortex it sputters and dies, smothered and crumbled before the words can leave her mouth. I try to help her. I know her vocabulary, her pet phrases, her sense of humour. Sometimes I can fill in the gaps, say her words, stitch the pieces of her memory together for her. If I get it right she sits up, leans in, and I feel the gratitude that shines out from her. A stranger could not do that, could not guess the words, could not learn the nuances of her history, could not know which triggers hook to which stories. Not even a really nice stranger. She needs family for that.

For years I have wanted to bring her and Dad closer. Closer to their grandkids, to medical care, closer to my corn chowder, to my memory stitching. A nursing home was never our first choice, and now it's not an option at all. Not in 2021. We tried bringing Mother to stay with me in my little house. My little house with the narrow stairs. Stairs going up. Stairs going down. It didn't work out at all. She was constantly restless, wandering, her eyes pooled with confusion, looking for Dad, wanting to go home, asking him to come for her. They need to be together, safe and nearby. Even at best she doesn't have much further to go on this life journey. She needs us, her family, there to walk with her these last few miles.

That's where my black notebook comes into play. My pages of envisioning. My lines of gratitude. My messy webs of brainstorming, summoning a solution from the depths of the universe. It was one of those webs that nudged me to auction that old Bob Dylan vinyl. Who knew someone would think it was worth $20,000?! I didn't even like that album, too nasally, too rambly...

I liked the $20,000 though. Liked it a lot! And now the excavator is here, shaking the earth, renewing my faith, breaking ground for the Granny Flat where my parents will live thirty steps from my door. They will be together, and I will be here to walk Mother home.

"Thank you Universe," I whisper, "I love how you work!"