Passages

One year.

One year ago

My mother died.

Online, I was silent.

Lynne posted the news on Facebook, in my absence.

Absence of public spirit, of articulated voice, of defining words.  I did write.  Mostly poetry.  I cried, still cry, complicated tears.  Of missing a presence, her presence, of loss of her place in my life.

I also cried the tears of one whose trial is over.  I cried the tears that I couldn’t let myself cry when I had no choice but to keep going.  I cried the private tears that aren’t explained, don’t have to be explained, to anyone.  I didn’t articulate the reasons. The grief that I felt was from a universal well.  That her life ended, that her difficult life ended, that I called her life difficult but she did not.  I didn’t want debate, or defense.  But I still envy those whose grief is pure, who wish their mother (father, sister, partner, lover) were still here.  I don’t wish that.  For her or for me. 

For her, I wish total fulfillment of love, the one thing that meant the most to her, as to any of us.  Love is the one thing I tried to give her, to interweave with the harsher realities of her final years.  She was confused, disabled, dependent. She was dependent on care doled out in a for-profit institution, by strangers who are assigned to care for her.  Some did, some did come to care for her.  You live through this process.  The days when caring wasn’t there, or when care givers reached the limit of caring, don’t have enough time to care for themselves, lose steam and yet can’t stop. 

I witnessed that the life of a care giver is a life of erosion, of wearing down your resources, your best intentions and your open heart.  I saw this in them, the aides who earn their living giving care under difficult circumstances.  I witnessed this in me.

Sara (my mother's care giver), Cooie Hedman, and Sky

My mother smiled at me when I arrived, usually, and that would be the best gift.  There were times when she did not, and I would try to root out the cause.  It could be simple—the wrong skirt on, or a wrinkle in her socks, or being left too long in one position.  It could be that the bird feeder was empty, or that she was confused about the day.  Sometimes she said it hurt, but I didn’t know what hurt.  I tried all the remedies that I could think of. I asked the nurses to give her more Tylenol.  The aides promised to get her into bed early.  We tried shifting her in her chair.  I ordered her some ice cream.  I played with her animals, making them all sing.  Later, I realized that none of these remedies addressed the pain that she was experiencing.  She said, at the end of her life, “It really hurts.”  I couldn’t help her except to call in the nurse, and eventually, to sign up with Hospice.  I encouraged her and told her how proud I was of her, because I was.  She did not complain much.  When we finally realized that she was eaten up with cancer, I was humbled by how brave she had been.

Who she was to me…  Someone I cared for, loved, but whose needs I juggled with my own, until the end.  Then it was too late.  There wasn’t enough time left.  I was there with her, Mari and Kit were there, Lynne was there.  The ones who wanted to be there, were there.  She was someone different to each of us.

I admire the women who say of their mothers, “I wish she was still here,” and “I keep her always in my heart.”  I do keep her in my heart, partly because her story is my story.  Her path was as uneven as mine.  I see myself in her.  I yearn for love the way she did.  I was not granted physical beauty anymore than she was.  I struggle to find my place in the world as she did.  She counted the badges she earned, she kept her awards and her certificates of thanks.  She took her volunteer jobs seriously, just like I do.  I define myself by my work, and without it I am lost.

On the Friday before she died, she was alone in her room when Sara came.  Sara let the silence remain as they sat looking out the window.  My mother said, “I hate not having anything to do.”  So they colored, until it was time to eat.

At her burial, my brother Thom brought a piece of embroidery that my mother had started, but never finished.  It was a Girl Scout insignia on white cloth.  The length of green thread that she had started to sew with was still there.  “This gives her something to work on,” he said, as he placed the embroidery hoop in the hole in the ground.

The unfinished embroidery is in the ground with her ashes.  The need to define your self with work lives on in me.

I have her ceramic Christmas tree on a table in our living room.  It is lit by fiber optics delivering colors from the color wheel out to the tip of each branch.  It fades from the glow of green to the glow of red to the glow of blue, then yellow, noiselessly.  I gave her that decoration when she moved to her first “independent living” apartment in Florida.  She put it on the pass-through between her kitchen and her living room.  In time, she moved it to her assisted living studio, and then to her second assisted living apartment.  I went to that apartment when she was in the rehab unit.  There was the ceramic Christmas tree, alone is her empty apartment.  I mentioned it to my sister who helped pack up her belongings to send to Bellingham.  It made the trip, and displayed its rainbow of colors each of the three years that she was here.  She loved the tree.  The last year, in her room at the end of the hall in the long term care facility, it stayed on 24 hours a day. She was past the point of noticing it.  As Christmas approached, I think it was on more for my spirit than for hers.  I had bought a Christmas outfit for her baby doll, but by the time I brought the gift to her room, she was fading away, hardly able to acknowledge the doll which had been her darling since we gave it to her for her 98^th birthday in July.  We propped the festively dressed doll up in bed next to her head, but she was already drifting into her final sleep.  I had hoped for one more expression of delight for her, but I was too late for that. 

In early December, I had decorated her door in hopes that she would like it, covering the door with red Christmas wrap and hanging up a red wreath and some gold ribbon. I had asked my friends to come to her room to sing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve, and they had kindly agreed.  The day before, I sent a short email of cancellation.  The moment was passed.  She had died on December 23^rd, 2014.  We spent Christmas Eve dismantling her room, taking down her decorations for the last time, and dispersing her belongings.  She didn’t need them anymore.

We are decorating this year.  My youngest sister Mari sent me three electric deer which I have planted on the front lawn. I hung the white icicle lights on the front of the house and the colored string of lights across the front fence.  I hung up the crystal reindeer that Viv, Lynne’s sister-in-law, had given us many years ago, when Lynne’s mother was alive and we celebrated with Lynne’s brother and sister-in-law visiting from Canada. 

Totsie Pharis, Lynne's mother, Christmas 2003

We lived in a big stone house in Kentucky, put up a tall Fraser fir tree in the living room, and had so many presents that they couldn’t all fit under the tree.  We spend Christmas morning playing Santa.  Viv had a particular knack for giving creative and thoughtful gifts, including to the dogs of both households.  Lynne’s mother would enjoy spending the entire day with us, keeping up a stream of conversation from her mid-morning arrival until after Christmas dinner in the evening.  The first few years, Richard brought venison, deer steaks and duck that they had hunted in Canada, and the house would fill with the smells of game for Christmas dinner.  Lynne misses those years.  Her mother is gone, Richard and Viv leave for New Zealand before Christmas.  We have a new tradition of celebrating with newer friends here, but we have wistful memories of those traditional celebrations.

Lynne misses her mother, in the classic way.  She wishes she were still here.

I am painting a portrait of our experience of this Christmas.  It is a mixture of memories of earlier Christmases, some treasured and some hard.  I am eager for this holiday because I notice in particular the messages of love and peace, of good cheer and delight.  I hear more music, and I sing along.  I delight at the Christmas lights, especially in contrast to the long hours of darkness that wrap around our short days here in the Northwest.  Today was the first day of sun for a week.  Mt. Baker has a record snowpack.  Lynne is playing the piano, and Winnie is asleep on the floor at my feet.  Life is complex, and beautiful.

 Merry Christmas!

The Eagle Dimension

                My heart leapt when we stepped out on the viewing platform and I heard multiple eagle calls filling the open valley. Before me, dozens of bald eagles were standing on the mudflats, some perched on rocks in the river, their dark yellow feet visible above the river; some standing in shallow water up to their feathers, some on the gravel edges of the mudflats. On the far side of the river, the field seemed to be scattered with dark rocks.  Peering through binoculars, I saw the rocks were actually more bald eagles, resting on stumps or logs.  They also occupied the branches of leafless trees along the river banks, where the giant birds posed quietly, seemingly biding their time, as if they were extras waiting to act in a movie.  Now I estimated a hundred eagles, just from where we stood.  By the end of the day, we saw more than we could count.

                Occasionally an eagle would rise up from a tree, spread its wings and fly along the river through the valley, then settle down to a new, still serious, stance. The lush, golden lowland valley is bounded by dark green forested mountains to the east and to the west. Not far downstream from our perch, the Harrison River flows into the Fraser River. This is the conduit for the salmon returning from the ocean to this place to spawn, and die.

                During other seasons, the eagles that I see around lakes or at the coast are so far away, soaring high above or perched at the top of the tallest tree.  Even at a distance, they are easy to identify because of their size and their white head and tail feathers. Having lived much of my life in a part of Kentucky where turkey vultures were the biggest raptors around, I am eager to see bald eagles, in part because their numbers have rebounded after facing the threat of extinction. I stop to look whenever I see one, or whenever I hear one.  Now living in Washington, I heard that I could witness a gathering of hundreds of bald eagles in early winter. Bald eagles migrate from all around to feast on dead salmon.  A particularly large gathering is on the mudflats at the confluence of the Chehalis and Harrison Rivers in British Columbia, less than 60 miles north of where we live. There, these carrion eaters scavenge the carcasses of salmon which have “expired” (as the scientists say) after spawning.

At first, seeing so many eagles on the ground was like seeing a flock of oversized, white headed, well-dressed turkeys.  Yet the resemblance ends there. The eagles exude casual dominance as they stood very deliberately facing upstream. They never ceased their visual surveillance, turning their necks every few seconds to assess the activity in all directions with their keen stare.  Yet at the same time, they seemed unconcerned by us, the humans peering back at them from the sidelines, where we were restrained by the simple rope or by the signs warning us to stay off the mudflats. Meanwhile, gulls wandered around them, picking at scraps.  The wriggling salmon fins cut the surface of the turbulent water nearby, as the salmon went about laying roe for the next generation before they died.

An eagle on the edge of the water about 30 feet from me was standing with a dead salmon gripped in its talons. Every few minutes it would bend its neck to tear off a chunk of the carefully guarded carcass.  The eagles near it were nonchalant. Have they already been sated? Were they digesting while they hung out before plucking their next meal out of the water?

Occasionally an eagle would open its massive hooked beak and stretch out its neck to let loose a loud assertive call: a musical warble of short descending notes that carried across the valley. The effect of having so many eagles gathered was to hear an ongoing chorus of captivating eagle calls coming from all directions.  I felt like I had stepped into a new dimension, the eagle dimension. I felt honored to be there.

Postscript: To get to this special place, Lynne and I headed north from Bellingham and crossed into British Columbia, following the two lane highways to a neighborhood near the eagle preserve, and then taking a short walk down a path to the edge of the mudflats.  Humans have a contradictory relationship with the eagles.  Local authorities have drawn boundaries around these mud flats to create Chehalis Flats Bald Eagle and Salmon Preserve (for the wildlife) and Eagle Point Park (for the humans), and have made a good effort to educate the public on respectful ways to see the eagles without tramping on the mudflats and tearing up the spawning habitat.  At the same time, a subdivision called Eagle Point Estates is being built right up to the edge of the preserve, a process which involves knocking down trees that stand in the way of the new upscale homes. I hope that the human intrusion will not keep the keen eyed impassive eagles from returning here each winter, allowing us future up close visits to the eagle dimension.  Here is a link to a discussion of this very issue: http://fraservalleybaldeaglefestival.ca/preserve/
If you want to see the eagles, here is a link to a map with suggested viewing sites: http://fraservalleybaldeaglefestival.ca/maps/CFBESP-MAP.pdf