. . .
You tell yourself that something has to happen. You tell yourself that somehow, someone is planning some sort of rescue. You say this cannot be true, that this is not happening to her. You say she is just an old woman whose time has come, who has lived a good life, who is departing, but cannot go and is so frightened of what will come if she must stay. You tell yourself that so many others have suffered more, lost more, lived less. You say that it is just her time, your time to bear sadness and farewells.
. . .
Many times in my life I have felt adrift and worried, screwed up, lost. When these moments start to shake me up, I remember coming home from St. Louis in our old green station wagon, lying in the back watching the lights on the highway signs, surrounded by bags of dresses with my fingers blackened from the hard licorice drops my father procured on every visit to Stix, Baer & Fuller where they once had a candy counter stocked with everything. Sometimes I rode in the front seat, between my parents, and would wake up after what seemed only moments of travel to find us driving into the driveway of the house in Madison.
. . .
“Mind your own business.”
“You are my business.”
. . .
It is raining on our old house, on my grandmother’s house, on the corner where the ladies used to gather, on the place where the lumberyard was, on the sidewalks where we walked, on Mammy’s house with the many chimneys, in our backyard, on my father’s thirsty trees. We watch the rain fall: her silences, my secrets; my secrets, her silences.
I watch the rain overflow the gutters and fall in cascades into the overflowing hanging baskets. Because of the holiday, I have bought her all the things she likes, special treats of the kind to please a little girl.
“The winter is coming,” she says.
“I know, but we will stay warm inside our house.”
As I draw closer beside her, she allows me a rare liberty: I stretch my arm across her shoulder. But she stands with her arms held stiffly at her sides. She does not touch back. We say nothing at all.
Epilogue
The night before our first visit to the oncologist, I sat in my father’s office, looking over his seashells and waiting as Betty brushed her teeth and prepared to lie down. Most nights, when she falls back, she doesn’t hit the middle of the mattress, only the edge. I am always terrified she will fall off in the night. Now, before she sleeps, as she protests, I put my arms around her shoulders and under her knees to lift and position her in a safer spot. She hates it, cannot stand relinquishing her body to someone else’s control.
After turning out the light that night, I put my hand across her forehead, hoping to quiet her distress. Panic showed in her eyes. “You’re okay,” I said. “Now try to sleep. I will get you through this. You’re my partner.”
I thought that the doctor would say she was dying. I was prepared to let her go, to spare her pain, if that was what she chose. My father died months shy of my parents’ fiftieth anniversary. “Fifty years,” he said to my mother the Christmas before he died. “Fifty years! That’s too damn long.” And then he laughed and slapped my mother on the rear end.
“Too damn long”: This is what my mother thinks about her life. She seems to believe she is taking someone else’s time. This is part of what it is to be very old. Part of her is ashamed to stay here longer; she doesn’t feel entitled to more.
That is what I was thinking about that night, about her deciding to leave, about having to allow her to go. By her bed I noticed her sandals, her poor old sandals, waiting for another morning in the world.
. . .
The summer of the drought was followed by an autumn where the leaves left unburned changed color quickly and were gone. All winter, the house was chilly in the mornings. We found out that Betty is not eligible for Tiger Place; they felt she needed too much special attention.
“I thought that was the point,” I said.
On the first Wednesday of March, Betty awakened, complaining of pain in her side, worried about her heart. When the ache spread to her side, I took her to Columbia to the emergency room. She sat in the examining room in her pink Mizzou T-shirt, saying nothing; but when the doctor pressed her abdomen, she screamed out and I knew. She was very ill.
Betty demanded to go home so loudly that I could barely hear the doctor describe, after the CAT scan, the blockage in the tube leading from my mother’s kidney, probably a tumor. There was also a mass in her spleen, but the kidney was the immediate concern. She would probably lose it and was admitted to the hospital and given painkillers and an IV.
She told the doctor, begrudgingly, that she had been experiencing pain for a while.
“What?” I asked.
“It wasn’t that bad,” she said.