It is hard seeing your own mother as sick, vulnerable and dying. While she languished inside her apartment for several months I would come over to see her every day, to clean, cook something, coax her to eat. She had no appetite. She would mention that she would often sit quietly for hours, looking at the various patterns in her living room carpet. She had grown frail and very thin, this once robust, confident woman who seemed undaunted by any challenge that life might fling in her face. Now she was bowed down by cancer. I often had a vision of her as tiny, like a helpless little bug or mouse, trying to dodge a ruthlessly stomping booted foot.
These times together were precious for both of us. Flippy at first wanted to be in on the act. It was his assumption that we had to do absolutely everything together. I resented this but he was stronger than I and always had his way. Mom was particularly indignant and she told him in very clear terms that she did not want to see him. She neither liked nor approved of him and saw him as a malicious, manipulative, vacuous airhead. Mom was an astute judge of character. He yelled at her and we both left. He ignored me when I told him what I thought of his way of talking to a sick and dying woman, especially my mother. But Flippy was a sociopath. He hated and resented his own family. His younger brother had once given him a hand made Christmas card. Flippy's expression of gratitude? He tore it up right in front of his brother's face.
Despite Flippy's resentment I did the right thing. Thanks to the largess of Dopey's generous donation of the equity from the sale of her condo to the community I didn't have to work and could spend my days caring for Mom always followed by excruciatingly long walks that would take me through the cemetery (where I would go every day to prepare for her passing), then through Queen Elizabeth Park then off to Shaughnessy Heights for a long walk among the palatial homes. I would end up downtown visiting the various street people I knew. Even though I was supposedly ministering to them they also became friends and were in their way very supportive to me about my mom.
When she fell and broke her hip in October I rushed to the hospital. Her bed was surrounded by four of her siblings, all in their sixties, and me. She lay there, medicated and comatose and we were sure she would be dying that same day. She somehow rallied but she would never see again her apartment. The hospital would be her home now till she passed away four months later.
Then began another vision that repeated itself on me about Mom: a field of brilliant green grass surrounded by trees and the sun shining bright on the grass till it became like a field of blazing green fire.
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