REBUILDING THE PAST

“Remember me and smile, for it's better to forget than to remember me and cry.”
― Dr. Seuss

As I sit here today, Mom lies in her prison on a hospital bed. The only things that move are the lips that taught and nurtured 5 children, and the eyes that follow me in my ramblings. Her eyes now act as her hands once did, smiling, laughing and disapproving as she follows what I say. She usually asks me what I planned for my day, and then will take me down a road of conversation of her choosing. I try to stay on that path: as that is the only thing left in her life that she can control.

What she likes to talk to me about is old times, the things that she recalls and made her happy, the things that made her my mom. Now when I walk in her presence, it is with a special reverence for who she still is, in spite of her incapacitation. We don’t discuss today’s world, today’s world is her pain and suffering, instead, she feels I remember a lot and can relate better times, when she felt pain, and joy, laughed and cried, felt the cold and heat and had a dream for tomorrow. We talk about people we knew, places we were and events that occurred with those people and places.

She knows what is happening: she knows that the time is almost gone, maybe even borrowed. I try to make that time with me pleasant as possible. She looks for me to come and sit by her side, and gives me a weak but sincere greeting. It makes me feel good about myself. I feel that maybe I didn’t disappoint her throughout my life: maybe I did do something that she even is proud of me for.

I usually pull up the chair that is next to her last place on Earth, the chair I first placed there, and I always open with teasing her about something. She squeezes her eyes tight and laughs, and I am whole again. Someday I won’t ever feel that again, someday that will be taken away from me forever. When I say goodbye, there is a sadness in her eyes and looks away, I feel the guilt of leaving.

If there is one thing I wish for her, it is that she have a happy death, and maybe it will give peace to her mind and it will cease to torture me as I watch in helplessness a woman who can only lay there, almost in a comatose state of physical existence and wonder why this is happening to her, as she does. My older sister and I have felt the brunt of the anguish, know the pain that Mom is suffering because she can only lie there, the sadness that fills that room even on the sunniest of days.

Somehow I have learned that there is a joy in the finality of death.  That we cease to suffer when suffering is the only thing offered to us, and death is the relief we seek.

May 31, 2014

Good bye may be forever, farewell but a salute to the end, but in my heart your memory will always stay.

I love you Mom.