Peace in the Valley

 

My mom is in a nursing home in Tennessee, and I went to visit her this weekend, along with Bill and my sister Robbin.  They're all in the picture I took above.  I don't normally like to write about personal stuff, but this trip to Tennessee has been a beautiful and heartbreaking thing, so I wanted to share the meaning with whomever reads this.  

My mom has always been an enigma to me, and probably me to her.  As I grew up, she was over-the-top religious, stubborn to the point of making you lose it, sometimes selfish and vicious, but also fun-loving, sweet, kind, generous.  Short and round and energetic.  Nervously trying to make a life, and trying to recover from what life does to you.  She was always scratching her way toward some kind of purpose I don't think I ever understood.  Sometimes I felt so estranged from her I wondered what I was actually supposed to feel for her, what "love" actually is.  She was always desperately asking me to visit her, but then when I got there we didn't really know what to do.  And usually we'd end up getting into a big argument over nothing.   

In the nursing home dayroom, she knew me and Robbin and Bill, but didn't sometimes, but then after a blink and a stare she said our names, laughed.  She's lost a lot of weight.  She can't walk.  Her fragility has given her a sense of both tranquility and a sense of queenliness.  I have never seen her like this before, and it was both scary and revelatory because I felt like I can love her now in a way I never thought I could:  this weird form of respect has blossomed.  And I don't have any regrets for the past with her because she seems to know all of that was just about then.  Now she's here.  Let's just be nice.

It's in her face, this new resolve, this new way of being.  In fact, at the nursing home, the staff call her "Vera," which is actually her first name.  She went by "Ruth" (her middle name) most of her life.  I don't know why this has happened, but it seems right.  

This is Vera now.

And in the dayroom we talked about all the great food she used to make:  the cornbread and beans, the Sunday roast and potatoes and carrots, the sloppy-joes.  About the donut place we went to on Friday mornings when we were kids.  About how she used to ask me and Robbin to hide the Twinkies and cookies from her so she couldn't get up in the middle of the night and eat them.  About all the jobs she's had in her life:  motel-cleaner, baby-sitter, waitress, cook, nursing-home worker, and so on.  About losing her sister last year and how that really made her more than sad, more than lost.  About Mark, her husband, and their little house in Black Bottom near the river, and their car, which she was worried had a dint on the hood.

She seemed to know where she was, but also she'd forget and then think she was home.  Or needed to get home.  She was not confused though.  She was just going in and out of her life, free from all the turmoil and need, and somehow more aware of who she was and is and will be.  

And at one point she looked at Robbin and me, and she said, "We made it, didn't we?  All of us have a good car and a good house."

I think maybe that is all she really ever wanted, was to be able to tell us that we'd made it through.  And thankfully we had the privilege of witnessing that proclamation, that summary.  

Robbin, Bill and I went to dinner at Bonefish on Saturday night, had some drinks, and toward the end of the meal I started to talk about Mom and I said I was glad she had religion in her life because I think maybe that's what is allowing her to be this way now, that she knows deep down where she's going to end up, and all the nerves and stubbornness have dissolved.  I'll never be religious in any way shape or form, but I will honor that part of her life just because of that.  I was a little drunk so I started crying in the Bonefish, had to walk out.  It was a breakdown that needed to happen to me; it was my way of knowing I loved her and always will.  My way of knowing, too, that love is undefinable, cryptic, and comes at you when you least expect it or want it.  It isn't a sentiment.  It's a shock to the system, always.