The Tangibility of Presence.

 

Another four boxes arrived at my house today. Poorly packed. A haphazard conglomeration of sections of her home. Today’s batch were the contents of her art studio. The smallest room in her house. It was one of three upstairs in the old section of my parents late 1700’s log cabin. In today’s homes it would have been converted to a closet for brooms, swiffers, and the lot of disposable home keeping items that rest for a few days and find their way into landfills at the end of their short lifecycle. For my mom it was the place to display as much as contain the supplies her mind could spin into works of art. She needed rooms to herself, and, interior expressions of herself. Places to imagine as much as to invent. This was a space to conjure as much as it was to collect. We are alike in this. My house also has its own art studio… it is the size of a modern roomy bedroom. It wasn’t an after thought it was a necessity. She fit herself into places, I bust through little spaces in an attempt to living larger than I need to. Where she is demure and polite about her spaces, I am loud, outstretched and unapologetic. Between us there is a need for color, pattern, creativity and owning the whole of it.

The boxes burn me. They are carelessly complied. Dumped more than given. It is a scab I feel opened too many times over the last year. We are less than a week away from her one-year anniversary and still her belongings find me. I am supposed to be grateful to be given the first right of refusal. There have been giveaways of her things that ended up in the Amish’s hands. Not to be entitled, but, the Amish don’t care about things. Its sort of their thing to not want things. And yet they end up there. I think because my dad believes they are grateful for them. I suspect they just think he’s a little off. Who gives things to a religion built around anti-things? A few months ago he told me that he was so delighted to see the Amish kids get all excited about the pile of sunglasses he found.

“What? You gave them sunglasses?”

“Yes. They were moms.”

“No, they were mine. They were ones she borrowed. They were Prada, Maui Jim, and Gucci.”

He had no idea what I was talking about. “Huh, it didn’t even occur to me to ask you.”

“So, there are Amish kids walking around with $600 sunglasses on?” I wasn’t amused.. he has since been bringing me the boxes to inspect before dropping off at the clothesline yards around his house.

The Mothers Day gift from me to my mom, circa 2008 (maybe?)

The betrayal of getting rid of her things. Erasing all traces. The boxes hurt me as much as anything else does. Maybe more. I just cannot understand how he can get rid of her? He was clearing the house of her, “her clutter” as he would call it, before she died. That infuriated me. The boxes pick that scab.

The not understanding that she, just like me, and Diedra, needed these things. They are the tangible reminders of the life we lived. The times we want to resurrect in our minds when the days seem alone, bleak, quiet and mute. Why did he never know her? Why can’t he want to keep her around as his own tangible reminders of the life she once had?

I bet you can't guess what these are?
Painted wooden candle holders for a birthday cake.
For the girl that loves Alice in Wonderland they are perfect!

And yet with each box I feel a piece of her is still here. I sit peacefully and talk to her. Remind her where these things came from. How much we enjoyed being around them as they were around us. They are the last tangible reminders of her and for that I am grateful. 

 There are pieces of her in these boxes that she spent months on. The two quilted vests. Don’t get me wrong they were awful when they were in the works. A middle class version of a coat of many colors,,, handmade, with abundant love, but hideously gaudy. No kid who ever wanted to retain their own milk money would be caught dead in a quilted vest. It didn’t matter what year they were made, or what kind of atrocious fashion sense we didn’t have in the early 80’s, these vests were bad. Not to mention the number of hours she put into them. She was so proud of herself when she completed them. And I was so humiliated to wear them. I wore mine once to a girl scout dinner. I was 8. There is no pride in anything at 8. I knew it.

Even Storm is horrified at the sight of my vest.

Her life is like these boxes. Amassed, unfinished, and uncategorized. Just a pile. A pile packed up and left. She was more than this collection of things. The bag of calling cards. Businesses, places, and people she met along the way. The pile that was 4 inches high, weighing a half a pound in a severely overstuffed purse. She would pick them up at any place we went that she wanted to remember. Little notes written on them to remind her why she kept them. “our cherry kitchen table.” “brown sweater.” And dates to coincide with their finding her.

Two children's toys. A pull toy boat hand painted with a shaking hand. A black train with yellow racing stripes. We bought them about 5 years ago at Olde Thyme Days in Fawn Grove. The display they came from was packed with hand carved wooden toys of every imaginable type; animals, cars, boats, doll house furniture. I know she bought them because she wanted to support the elderly artist who made them. She identified with the struggling artists. She was a patron of folk art and folks who made it look native. She never found a child for them. She needed them to remind her of that day. She said she was buying them to have a present at the ready for an impromptu visit to any family who had little kids.. I know her better than that. I’m sure the conversation would have been centered around the intention still being legitimate, but the reality is visual reminders keep memories alive. We had two pieces of pie that day. It was too hard to narrow the list of homemade pies from 20 to one, so we would always buy as many as we wanted to try.. and then rummaged through the vintage and antique vendors. She loved that day in our little community fair. We ate pie, shopped local and felt at home.

She would be angry still. She got cheated, she knows it, I know it, everyone who knew her knew it.

She bet on more. There would always be more before her. More time. That’s the most bitter pill for her to accept.. she would have never swallowed willingly. You couldn’t force her to do anything. And yet maybe that’s what she needed? Forceful intentions? Reality premonitions. Promises put off to tomorrow and the calendar that would never come. She saved all of the scraps of our lives. She held onto them knowing (earnestly believing) that there would be so much more still ahead. 

We both agreed upon the necessity that even storage should be classy.

It has taught me, painfully reminds me everyday, that today is all. It might be all there ever it. I hold her little left over scraps. I fondly remember when they came into our story and I treasure them as the tactile emotionally laden tokens of a life I still share with her

The pieces;

The blue sock donkey. That pathetic sock lasted 40 plus years. Small and light has advantages over multiple moves.

The overstretched baseball glove sized terry cloth towel elephant. 

The J Crew tags/receipts and descriptive associated with each purchase. She loved that store. It was her go to present request place. She loved it so much she kept the price tags and receipts. That's devoted tangibility right there!

Her saved artwork from her previous students, with whom she never kept in touch. She would relive moments from her past to keep them alive but she wouldn’t remake them with present day re-acquaintances. She kept them in the past. Preserved. Protected and shielded from the rot of vulnerability.

There is a delicate balance to life. I think my mom lived hers living too close to the side that left her afraid so much of the time that she didn’t have any tools in her box to address dying. For all of the tangible things she had that had once brought her joy she had too few intangible tools to navigate her own mortality. She was not brave. There was no peace in her acceptance of her fate. She walked the earth avoiding confrontation, seething when it found her, and hiding in bitterness that she was unable to confront it. It transcended all aspects of her life. Even the time with me. The more she retreated the harder I pushed her to put up her dukes and stand her ground. It would never happen for her. I learned from this. I grew up wanting to be independent and self reliant. I wanted for myself what she couldn't attain. That her biggest fears were my greatest challenges to face before they found me. To her last breath she handed over the reins of her life to anyone willing to take her for a ride. While she was dying of breast cancer she let my dad search out “cures” from the people he met in the grocery store aisle, or, the internet with his one fat finger queries. He ended up at the number one search engine ips address of “Cancer Centers of America.” The place that offers Oz at the end of each patients bloodied yellow brick road. Salvation lay here. And, for the real bait kicker, they offered FREE treatments ("if you qualified"). Or so he told her. He aborted her oncologists plans. Had the ignorant audacity to say to us that “he believed the best chance at her cure was there. And that maybe her "oncologist could learn something from them." They were after all, and he quoted the advertisement here “the best you could find.” Months she didn’t have were wasted chasing options that wouldn’t put him paying $20,000 a month for the pills that were offered to her. My mom was given two free months of this new miracle drug and never swallowed one. The threat that she wasn’t going to be able to afford the pill on her 61^st day kept her from the one chance she had. When she was seen at Oz they looked her square in the face and told her it was too late for them to help her. She was too far gone for their studies and trials, and, they didn't want her dismal outcome to taint their trial results. At least they were honest with her. No one else was. She retreated to her house to hide like all of the rest of us behind CNN and the 24/7 COVID coverage.

She lived waiting to be the submissive to everyone else's choices. It was where she was comfortable. Not having to make decisions for her life left her able to complain when the consequences didn't go her way. She died waiting for affordable options. She also died in fledgling pandemic begging for company every health care worker was too afraid to provide her. She was cheated out of the only audience all of us should feel guaranteed to have; a chorus of compassion from people your life has touched. She wouldn’t use video conferences. I have found this to be true for others. The contact is what matters,, not a voice or video far away, but the person who sits beside you and peacefully holds your hand. The tactile with a pulse. There was never a tangible more for her, just lots of empty attempts, and, a house full of tangible memories. She died in her home on May 14, 2020 at 4:14 pm next to me. For her last days she hated everything. The more she never got, the stuff that couldn't fill her broken heart and the solitude that only a pandemic can bring.

The little pieces of her that still are here. Still hers. I will watch over them. They are what I am realizing I am becoming more of. I am becoming more about re-feeling than looking forward. Maybe there has been too much death around me? Maybe I feel I need to look back to remind myself that I can still feel her around me? Maybe I have this tangible need to feel and it’s holding me hostage? I don’t really know, but, I know I miss her and I know its easier to have her with me when her things are around. So I pick through them half angry they aren’t in her house, and half glad they are in mine.

This blog is the Mother's Day section of a book I am working on. It's for, and, about my mom.. it is the conversations we never had.

 

 Happy Mother's Day mom.. we miss you.

The First Christmas Without Her. The Holidays Since The Passing Of My Mom

My mom died on May 14, 2020 at 4:14 pm. I was alone by her bedside, begging her to not let me be the one she stopped on. She was as obstinate as an ox she never listened to me. We were antagonists. Best friends, yes, but bitterly brazen with each other. She was what I wasn’t, or more aptly, refused to be, and I was what she couldn’t be. And, yet, we were each other’s go-to person. It was infuriating almost incessantly and it never wavered. It still hasn’t. She’s gone and I am still here cleaning up her unfinished intentions. I have placed them above my own, another infuriating admission.

It is almost Christmas. For her this was the pinnacle of her favorites. She had a lot of them. She would call it her “best” list. There was no middle ground with her. It either was the “best,, ever” or it just was. I was rummaging through one of her boxes of left-over belongings, of which she also had many. Too many to go through in her last days in any kind of semblance of organizing. The painstaking last days with her were full of anger, falling deeper into herself and palpable denial of the cheating she was conceding herself to. While she was growing more despondent, less aware, she was also growing increasingly irritable. I knew it to be the acceptance that her grip on this life was being pulled from all of our clenched fists. December 2019 was the last pieces of her life that I can say had any value to them. It was the last time of any kind of normalcy was assigned to a calendar and a season. My birthday was on December 14. She had her mastectomy on the 16th. One celebration marred by the fear of another looming day. She returned from the hospital two days later resilient to have it behind her, and, recovering like a vigilante. She was up and resuming her life of decorating her old log home for all of us to be present on the 25th. There were garlands of tiny jingle bells encircling her candle lit chandelier over the farmhouse dining table. Head-knockers the rest of us called them., had they ever been lit for real we would have all had heads full of flames. She was barely 5 ft tall. She was the only person who enjoyed them unencumbered. Like everything else her home was hers. She wanted you to think it was beautifully festive, but, livable for life-sized humans was not a priority. The farmhouse dining room table dated from the early 1800’s when growth hormones in mild remained yet undiscovered and people weighed 70 pounds and never hit the 5-foot finger for the carnival ride admissions. She was small, tiny, frail for the last 6 months, but never not fierce. The lot of us sat sideways to eat. She pulled her chair up and was perfectly content as the only one with elbows to table. 

I know she left this life feeling as if she had been cheated. That’s the single thing I carry the heaviest in my heart. She may not have ever written out, or declared a plan, but with all of her life weighted on the “best’ side there was no continuum of a life spectrum that allowed peaceful passage.

As December ended and the cold of Winter settled in she was becoming more painful, less able, and running the maze of ineptitude that stole her the ability to define how she wanted to spend her last days. There was promise, shallow, empty, and inconsequential all around her. Falsities that there would be more for her. More years, more holidays, more time and yes, even hope. Thinking back on it maybe that was for her benefit? Once she was finally diagnosed, and her prognosis laid out she rolled over and gave up. She said that it was just so she could go home. Be the one place she was most content. There in her dark log cabin steeped with historical markers of significance she was most at peace. March brought bed. Bed led into wheelchairs, oxygen tanks and bedside commodes. Life steals your freedom as much as it does give you purpose. Once she was relegated to that room every tiny piece of tinsel in its purview served as redirected aggression. The tv had, (absolutely HAD) to be on 24/7. Specifically, on CNN. It was an endless loop of pandemic fear. A 1950’s black and white psychological thriller that left ever viewer mad with bleakness. I have not watched the news since. I am not sure I will ever be able to again. She was desperate to hear bad news coming from others peoples lives as a way to blanch and beige her own. Other people were dying suffering, therefore, she was not alone. I drowned my madness in buckets of soapy water and vacuum cleaner bags. I did for her the manual labors of keeping a house her pain-filled movements stole. I stayed distracted while she stayed glued to the tube. She refused to sleep. She was angry, but, she wasn’t going to miss a minute. she became anorexic. Her last vestige of control. Constipation visited once and she wouldn’t be its pawn again, never mind the difficulty and embarrassment of assistance in getting to, and use the facilities small plastic child’s potty or green mile walk to the bathroom when it was still afforded to her.

She would not let go of that damned t.v. remote. It would not be allowed to watch anything but CNN. For all of the endless days I spent with her, and the begging I pleaded for any kind of terrible 80’s sitcom to just be free from the suffocating death it was met with anger. She would lie back, turn me off, and wait out her one hour, more often 30 minutes of Golden Girls in stubborn self-pity silence. I conceded after three days of trying. She played her death hand with biting fury. Absent from verbal request. She knew I felt sorry for her and that was enough to allow her any kind of three-room single level torture for as long as it was going to take.

February was all about cleaning out. Her Christmas decorations had outlived their welcome. I was answering her endless requests for cold packs, pillows, bed up, bed down, water, ginger ale, food she had no intention of eating, turn the lights off, close the shades, keep it dark, close out the world short of a 42 inch screen, find her phone, figure out the next dose of pain meds, and, “no” she had no idea of what she had taken last”, and, “no,” she had not written anything down, like ever,, or if she did she couldn’t remember if she actually took it, or just checked it off. Among all of this was her constant complaining about “why the Christmas decorations’ were still up. Everything was annoying. We were both onboard with that.

All of the joy of her life had up to this stumble been collecting things to look at and enjoy. Suddenly those same things were whispering to her. Hissing, spitting, and speaking in a tongue that nipped at her. 

“There’s too much stuff!” She wanted it away. Mind you she had a horizon of 20 feet, at most. But for February that bleak winter scape had to be clear cut. I tried to remind her how much joy these Yuletide tidings had brought her. Putting them out in their places just a few weeks ago. I attempted to find that place inside where I had always known her to reside. The place of things that brought memories of the life we had walked together. Every single, and I do mean this literally, every single piece of décor was something we had gotten together. Packaging it up was putting away pieces of her that I wanted to keep reflecting upon, and alive. As the exhaustion of the reality of her fading set in life changed. Hospital beds came. Oxygen machines with their tentacles spread all over the room. Pistons firing and they spit her moist breath back into her failing lungs. The antiques were shoved away. And one night the rest of the room went too. 

Within the days of grieving, her relentless pursed lips refusing to face the choir calling her, and the anger a family stuck in this place brings, I didn’t notice it. Days were bleeding into each other. No nights, no days, just doctors, piecemeal facilities, and poor investments in a dying woman no one wanted to take personal possession of in the form of informed guidance left us all lost, and then there was this pandemic problem. No one came or went without absolute scrutiny and the possibility of hitchhiking a virus on. She had options that all included, “if she goes you won’t be able to visit.” Which when you are dying surmounts to “say your goodbyes now.”

My mom always made the packages more delightful than the contents.
These are presents she gave me years ago. I will never open them.
They remain as so much of the things around me are, holding on to her.

I have kept her alive by keeping her stuff with me, the things I remember her with. In short doses of re-finding and investigation i open the boxes hastily removed from her home. I put up a Christmas tree yesterday. It is the first in about 7-8 years. She had one every year. We would help her procure it, place it, and she hoarded the decorating of it all to herself. For the trees I never had time to buy, place, decorate or enjoy she had hers and hers was only a few miles away. We didn’t need both. 

This brutal year, in this miserable season of social nothings, I cut a tree down in my own yard, and I decorated it with her ornaments. I am finishing things for her as I see it. It isn’t just about trying to keep her traditions alive, at least not this year. It feels like I am exhuming the things that remind me of her. 

My last Christmas present from my mom.

In one tucked away corner of the upstairs hallway I found her favorite ornaments. They had been piled in a basket. Discarded in a rush and without any idea of the value they possessed. Her antique bird ornaments. The kind with the tinsel tails. The kind you cannot find anymore. It almost crippled me to see how haphazardly they were piled. It infuriated me. She is in there and someone just piled them away. I know it was done with her yelling in the background to just “get them out.” 

I am coming to terms with the waves of emotions this brings. It is grief. All sides, shades and flavors. There is anger among them. I don’t know how to process the rest without acknowledging it in the gaps. 

Maybe the stuff she spent her life finding, the stuff that made the anger of her “best days” was the stuff that was bitterly reminding her of what she was losing? Her bitter edged visual reminder was easier to excise on her terms, then to surrender as stolen? Maybe she overlooked how important these things would be to those of us who had nothing else left as a tangible reminder? I am angry about all of this. How much she hated losing her life and how that hate colored, poisoned everything else around her. How that fear of everything (driving, standing up for herself in any way that didn’t make her look like a jaded victim, and staying with a miserable person who made her miserable) was also the same fear that wouldn’t let her feel grateful her children outlived her. Or that her life was always full of things she had found beauty in. This year has been smothered in death and loss and yet her little tree lives on in my home with all of its sparkling divineness. 

For more on my mom and our journey please see;

COVID's prisoners. Dying in the age of a pandemic.

The Journey. The missed opportunities and pit stops along the way.

Human vs Vet Medicine