Tag Archives: mothers and daughters

What other way can one threaten if not with death…..

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Powerscourt, Ireland (c) Carole Craig

What other way can one  threaten if not with death? The original, the interesting would be for someone to be threatened with immortality.”    Jorge Luis Borges        Biografía Verbal by Roberto Alifano,

[“¿De qué otra forma se puede amenazar que no sea de muerte? Lo interesante, lo original, sería que alguien lo amenace a uno con la inmortalidad.” ]

My mother has begun to talk of dying.

A litany of distant deaths:  the nurse  at the Farm Security Administration took a day off work sick, ‘They found her that day but she died.’  Her friend Malvina Reynolds in hospital, ‘I told everyone Malvina would get well, but she died’;  her sister at a nursing home, ‘We left and twenty minutes later she died’;  a neighbor who fell down dead,  ‘Can you imagine?  Just like that, she died.’

My mother has known other deaths.  Why these? They were all so unexpected.

‘I was thinking I was in control of my dying situation,’ she says.  ‘I would be able to say when to myself and die when I said. I don’t feel it any more’  My mother keeps her eyes on the corner of her room and clutches the bed rail.

At the end of the week she is calm.  ‘I was thinking I might die last night but then I thought it wouldn’t be fair to Alex.’

Her love for my daughter is worshipful.

Alex will miss you very much, but she won’t be surprised.  

Why hasn’t my deep grief begun?  Is it because our relationship was difficult? My mother in a moment of crisis told me it became difficult for her when I was five (that was not her word but it will do).  I thought it was nine when the babysitter came to live with us.

It has been painful, but I don’t think we’ve had the worst of relationships.  We liked to do things together.  She introduced me to the summer-traveling, life-changing circus.  I took her down the Amazon in a bird cage boat and across the Sinai in a taxi to Palestine for Christmas Eve in Bethlehem.

She put me through college and when I had to have money because my daughter was so desperately ill, I spent hers.  She needs me now and I have packed my Irish life and come.

I don’t think it is  the relationship that has stunted my feelings.  It seems to me that my mother is  trapped in a zero sum game.  The longer she lives the worse living becomes.

My mother tells me another story about death.  A friend was with her mother when she died.  “She said she saw her mother’s soul leave her body.  It flew around the room several times, so she went to the window and let it out.”

THE JUNK MAN

Carl Sandberg

I AM glad God saw Death
And gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired
of living:

When all the wheels in a clock are worn and slow and
the connections loose
And the clock goes on ticking and telling the wrong time
from hour to hour
And people around the house joke about what a bum
clock it is,
How glad the clock is when the big Junk Man drives
his wagon
Up to the house and puts his arms around the clock and
says:
“You don’t belong here,
You gotta come
Along with me,”
How glad the clock is then, when it feels the arms of the
Junk Man close around it and carry it away

Found in the folder with my mother’s will

Now it’s high watermark….

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Memorial Gardens Dublin (c) Carole Craig

Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go.― Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes

Somewhere in the complicated canon of Irish mythology there are stories in which the island of Ireland can hide itself at will, fading into the sea like a Tir na Og or a Hy Brasil.  Present, but unseen.

The week I leave Dublin, the poet Seamus Heaney dies.  He was my lecturer the first year, a humble bear of a man, a dear friend of friends; we went to the same parties then; heard the same gossip, shared tea in the university cafeteria. His death, too soon as death is, wounds.   Ireland is not more distant, merely less visible, its weight is felt.

The first week back with my mother: her face is round, her skin pink, her smile cherubic. It seems the flow of reports that she thrived, even somewhat recovered, are true.  Except it is rare now for her to leave her bed and sleep pulls at her constantly.  Behind the closed door she cries because it is so difficult to stand.

A hospice nurse telephones me.  He wants to discuss medication. She wheezes when she breathes.  Are these decisions about life or death?  ‘No. She’s fading,’ he says, ‘but not quickly.  Maybe she hasn’t decided it’s okay to let go.’

We’re going to need more money.  My two dogs, my one cat and I are living in the spare basement room; it keeps us out of other people’s way.  I will have to rent my mother’s room.  I want, gently, to talk to her about her things: what is precious? what is dear? what goes to whom?

‘Why are you asking her?’  someone says.  It is heartfelt,  concern for her is profound.  ‘She’s at peace, leave her alone. ‘

If I don’t ask, it will feel like revenge.

I start with her clothes because they have never mattered much to her, I haven’t liked many of them,  I think that will be easy.  Almost at once I come across her things for stage: the Palestinian dress we bought in Jerusalem, the Guatemalan one we bought in Mexico, the one that came from our friend whose husband died in this house and who died herself soon after.  There are shorts and shirts my mother embroidered and the ones that people embroidered for her.  I feel like a ghoul and only gather enough for a small bag.

Another visit with my mother:  Three people have died in the hospice.  They bring the bodies along the side of the building and she can see them pass.  She is not upset.

Do you think about dying yourself?

‘I prefer not to‘   She stares at a corner of her room for a long time, one hand holding the other.  I’m afraid of turning it off…’

What off?

An uncomfortable smile.  ‘I don’t know, I’ll think of it.‘

I wait.  Silence.

Again. ‘I’m afraid of turning it off…‘

I wait.

She closes her eyes and sleeps.

“Now it’s high watermark

and floodtide in the heart

and time to go.

The sea-nymphs in the spray

will be the chorus now.

What’s left to say?―

― Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes

I am going home….

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water and chair

                                               dunmanway, county cork (c) carole craig

En route to San Francisco

I am going home — one of the last places on earth I want to be.  Time, like a bounty hunter, has caught up with me.  My mother is 97 and counting.  Eating, dressing, the ordinary choices of life confuse her, but she choses not to leave her home, the life she has made.   And who can blame her for that — she is so firmly rooted, so well watered by love and fidelity.

She was a singer and is beloved, in the way that performers are, by hundreds,  perhaps thousands.   And she has friends, real friends.

Her politics have always been brave.  In the 1950s when segregation was still the law our home insurance was cancelled because both black and white people came to visit; my mother was not cowed by the clicks on the phone that told us of the wire taps or visits from the FBI;  in 1965 when a white woman on Martin Luther King’s Selma to Montgomery march was murdered I thought for several hours it was her because she was also there.

There are people, I’ve met them, who feel it is an honour to spend time with her.

I am not among them.  It’s not that we don’t love each other. We do, we’ve been through so much together  But to explain how I face my task I must say that  I never felt the  recipient of bountiful mother-love –– there are reasons for that, although this is not the place.  I have my scars and wounds. This is not the place.

I have come home because her heart’s desire to die where she has lived may no longer possible.  My mother can barely climb the stairs to the top floor and her single bed so she can watch the sun set over the Pacific as she falls asleep. She can barely climb the stairs to the middle floor to reach a toilet and refuses to try the commode.  Sometimes she sits in a chair on the landing and cannot remember if she was going up or down.

I have to find her a place of safety — this  a chronicle of that search.

I have had to leave my home in Dublin, my photographic projects, my cats, my darkroom, my books, my offer of an MFA and the planned cycle of short stories, my wonderful neighbors, the guiding wisdom of my writing group, the magical Irish light —  ‘ little dyings’.

Perhaps the most difficult,  I have to come to terms with America again  — the brutality, immorality, the beauty.  Re-enter dark water.  Sink or swim.  Today,  Kenneth Patchen, American of course, breaks the surface with me:

“All things are one thing to the earth

rayless as a blind leper Blake lies with everyman

and the fat lord lies next to his bastard at last

and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean what we think it does

for we two shall never lie there 

we shall not be there when death reaches out his sparkling hands

there are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter

which of them of death