Today my mom hid her face behind a sheet of paper. It happened as we were lying side by side on her bed at her new residence. What had we been talking about as we both gazed up at the ceiling? I don’t remember now. Something about the past, I suspect, but then suddenly I turned my head and saw her hiding behind the sheet music given to her earlier, which contained the words to Amazing Grace. The sheet was from the sing-along we had attended earlier in the community room. I thought she might be crying, hiding her tears from me. But when I asked her, are you okay? she lowered the sheet a bit, like a child playing peak-a-boo, and said, I thought I’d hide behind here to pray.
I didn’t know what to say to this, so unexpected it was. I felt I had desecrated the sanctuary she’d been trying to protect.
What a strange world I do my best to navigate: the world of my mother’s stop-and-go mind, so lucid, so confused, so caring, and then so blank, in an ever-changing cycle. And those slowly dimming looks she gives me—they’re of an animal nature, like the uncomprehending gaze of my dogs, desperate for communication. My mom has become another species. With this crude understanding, I try to accept her new way of being and the many surprises—like her secretive childlike attempt to create a sanctuary, a space inviolate, away from everything and everyone. Including me.
All the while, there is a stream, a constant stream of everyday life going on: the morning wake up, the challenge to get started in the morning, the need to walk the dogs, get coffee, and all the other choices and chores that crowd one’s mind. And then there are those other streams, like subterranean estuaries, that nevertheless are the streams of a life, that if you give them too much thought will engulf you utterly.
So it is with thoughts of my mother. I drive to work beneath the bright summer sun, thinking about the day ahead, looking forward to this, dreading that, when suddenly I’m struck by the realization that my mother is dying. Both mind and body are dying, even as she struggles as she has always struggled in life. But my mother is now small and frail, and her bones will surely shatter like glass around the rods already in place, if she falls one more time, and as I drive down the 405 freeway I’m almost woozy with this knowledge, beneath the summer sun, with tall palms swaying on either side, alongside other cars whose occupants are swept along no doubt by their own hidden streams. And I feel these streams converging inside and out, until I wonder how it is we don’t all crash.