Still Life
The truth is, I don’t know why she stayed.
I left. I went to college. I came west. I started a career. I started a family. And then one day, many years later, when I was a mother three-times-over myself, my father called to say that my mother had been in a traffic accident and hadn’t stopped and didn’t remember when she got home that there had been an accident. He heard the details from a cop who knocked on the door of the house to serve my mother with a warrant. A few months later, my father came home in the late afternoon to find my mother sitting on the bed still in her nightgown holding a pair of socks in her hand. She couldn’t remember what they were for.
By the time I saw my mother, she didn’t know who I was, and I hardly recognized her. She had always looked fifteen years younger than whatever age she was currently admitting to. She had always taken beautiful care of herself, her hair tinted and coiffed, her nails manicured and polished, her clothes understated and well-chosen. She loved coppery earth tones. When she came west to spend the last six months of her life with me, she was a thin, wrinkled old woman wearing a green polyester warm-up suit. She had rheumy eyes and bad breath.
It’s too bad our lives are not like made-for-TV movies. In the movie made of the last six months of my mother’s life, we would have both been more lovable. She would have been sweet and addled, dreamy and silent. She would have patted my hand not knowing who I was but knowing that my hand needed patting.