Tenderized

 

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes and I am left the same as I began.  The more things change, the more I am the same.

Notes to Myself, Hugh Prather

 

I am glad to be able to visit my mother again.  She will be 82 in September and I worried about her during the pandemic.  I feared that in her isolation she would be lonely, might not eat regularly or properly, may physically or mentally decline from the lack of socializing and activity.  She held out better than I could have hoped and is now back to twice weekly golfing games, almost daily lunches with friends, and day trips to Cape Cod or Rhode Island.  She has taken good care of herself for many years and is strong and pain free although her short-term memory is fading.  When I visited her recently, she couldn’t remember a recent family gathering to celebrate my daughter’s graduation from college.  With some prompting, however, she is able to recall who she visited with that week and if the weather permitted one or two golf outings. 

 

I have noticed that my mother is starting to shrink physically the way Nunzio (her father, my grandfather) started to shrink when he got older.  Smaller vertically and horizontally as if the bones themselves are starting to dissolve.  I was close to my grandparents Nunzio and Phillipa. Growing up, I lived in the downstairs apartment with my mother and father and they lived upstairs with my teenage aunt.  We ate most meals together, share household tasks like laundry and shoveling, went on vacations together. They played cards with me if I was bored and kept a cupboard of sweets I could dip into whenever I was in the upstairs kitchen.  They were always old to me but when in my late 20’s they started to become really old, my heart started to break every time I saw them.  We would gather at my aunt and uncle’s house for a Father’s Day barbeque or Christmas eve dinner at my parents, and at some point, I would notice my grandfather’s hands shaking with Parkinson’s, my grandmother staring off into space no longer able to participate in conversation.  Seeing their happiness at being with us all together in the midst of their fragility made my heart soft and tender.  I couldn’t stop the flow of tears that I did not understand until someone explained to me how we can grieve for anticipated loss.  It was also sad seeing how hard life was becoming for them.  At that point, my grandmother had been moved into a nursing home.  Nunzio lived in the upstairs apartment alone taking the taxi to the nursing home where he would spend the day with her.  My tenderized heart was preparing me for the incomprehensible losses and also opening a window into a way of loving that reaches beyond death.  Each parting broke my heart open a little further as I took in the understanding that it might be the last hug, the last words spoken and heard between us. 

 

During our recent lunch together, my mother told me I would have to decide what to do with her jewelry and china.  In the last few years, she often brings up what I will need to do when she is gone, where the key to the safety deposit box is hidden, the number for the financial manager, the folder with the funeral plans already half paid for.  But this was the first time she mentioned the jewelry and the china.  When I visit with my mom now, my heart has started to break open in the way it did when I was with Nunzio and Philly in their last years.  So much love flows out of this broke heart washing away the past hurts and pain, the misunderstandings, the spaces between us we have never been able to close.  This was her way of saying to me, “The unimaginable time is coming when you will remain and I will be gone.  I want to make sure you are okay.”  When my father was dying I told a family friend, “I don’t know how to say goodbye.”  She said to me, “Tell him you are okay, that you will be fine, that you love an appreciate all that he did for you, that he can rest now.  Let him go.”  I am not ready to say goodbye to my mother and know I can never be prepared for the loss of the mother grounding she has provided to me from my birth. But the rhythmic squeeze of heartbreak is visiting once again, tenderizing my heart, opening up the window for more loving now and to the preciousness of each goodbye.