Her True Calling: My Mother's Last Gift
By Jennifer S. Holland
Monday, May 5, 2008
My mother stopped trying to find herself when the tumor in her brain spilled from one hemisphere into the other, pushing the midline to one side like an unexpected bend in an arrow-straight road.
"They're on the move," she told me over the phone from the hospital the night she was diagnosed. "They're marching through." I suppose that in her drug-induced haze she meant the tumor cells were like soldiers advancing, leaving rubble in their path. It was the night before Thanksgiving, and after that she forgot where she was going.
For years she'd sought something she couldn't explain. "I need to fill my cup," she'd say. She tried it all: acting, singing, politics, religion, painting, buying houses and selling them soon after -- a "hobby" that almost ended her second marriage. She was going to save the local theater, fight animal cruelty, help dying children get wishes granted. As a nurse she traipsed endless avenues -- obstetrics, children's cancer, ER, addiction, hospice -- and to each she brought a special compassion and gentle hand. And each time she switched directions she thought she'd find that thing she was supposed to do, the person she was supposed to be.
I can picture her pondering her next move, sitting in her favorite sunny room upstairs with the sink-down chair wide enough for curled knees and two cats, the dream catchers and Santa Fe talismans on the walls. Her shelves are heavy with books (on laughter, on forgetting) and trinkets -- Dorothy's ruby slipper in miniature, a dish of sand raked into soothing swirls, urns of ashes of past cats and our old Weimaraner Gretel. And she has pictures of me here and there, one from our mother-daughter trip to Mexico years back -- a shot of two giddy brown-eyed brunettes sipping sour drinks through curly straws, our mouths in tight O's -- and of me posing with her in mind while on writing assignments around the world for National Geographic. For years she'd show them off to friends, eyes proud.
"Jenny, my love, my love," she sang into the phone one afternoon. "I think I've finally figured out what I need to do."
I braced myself a little, recalling recent talk of crystal energy therapy.
She was going to be a hospital chaplain, she said, and had already talked to someone over at the clinic.
It was something I could see her doing well, but this conversation was painfully familiar and I couldn't give in so easily. I'd grown weary of the constant flip-flopping from dream to dream, a once-endearing trait that had begun to make me sad, especially as I'd seen similar torments in myself: indecision, dissatisfaction, the fear that what was out there was better than what was inside me. I snipped at her: What happened to starting a foundation? Running for mayor? Building a university, revamping the animal shelter?
She was never put off by my tone, never let the negativity in. Her new career choice made more sense, she said. Politics gets too ugly -- all that testosterone. This is more spiritual and would fill that hole in her life.
But as always came the obstacles. The application asked for essays on who she was and what she believed. That meant focusing, having a perspective. (I later saw the yellow pad with her lovely compact script -- it always looked like writing that was practiced, as when a woman is changing her name and wants to see if it's pretty on the page.) She filled less than two sheets, a lot of words crossed off, the whole thing trailing off mid-thought. She soon abandoned the paperwork.
And she'd need to go back to school. Did she really need all those classes to help people? she asked. "Honey, I'm not sure if I know how to study anymore!" Still, she signed up for the first course, bought books and pens, notebooks with red covers and clean, smooth pages. I don't know that she ever attended a session.
And then, they told her she had to declare herself something. "I have to pick a religion," she moaned.
"What did you expect?" I asked. "It's a religious position."
She sighed, audibly. "I guess I was hoping I could just be whatever each patient needed me to be."
She never became a chaplain. Or mayor. She tried a lot of other things, though, and each gave her a glimpse at satisfaction before falling out of favor. Nothing was enough to keep the cup filled.
And then she got very, very sick, and the search hit a wall.
It was nearly two months after her illness was diagnosed. She was going to die soon, my mother, so I had gone home to be with her, skipping one of those field assignments that months before would have made her gush. I wanted to take care of her as she always did for patients or pets or me when I was hurting. We'd decided to do the humane thing: no chemo, no radiation. She was getting steroids, insulin, morphine now and then. More important were the most basic of things: blankets to keep her warm, chocolate pudding to make her eyebrows lift (our signal for yes), soft music of flutes and wolf howls. Loving hugs.
One night when she could no longer walk, and could barely speak, we were together in her room. The China-red walls were decorated with family pictures my stepfather had hung -- of my husband and me, my brother and his wife, their boy -- the grandchild my mother wanted for years and now would never know. And it got to me -- all of it. The horror of her decline, the humiliation she'd endured. After years of being a nurse to others, she could no longer put a spoon to her mouth or a brush to her hair.
And she would fade away some night soon still unsure of who she was.
My stepfather lifted her, a rag doll, onto the portable toilet set up near her bed. Her pajam as were stained down the front with cottage cheese. Blankets trailed from her shoulders, towels lay on the floor from the last cleanup. Pride gone. Muscles gone. Her hair was thin and upended from sleeping and smelled of scalp; that lovely smooth skin had finally lost its youth. And her eyes were heartbreakingly sad; in recent days they'd hardly connected with us, with anything we could see.
I was sitting holding her skeletal hand when I finally broke. Crying aloud, letting it all out -- feelings hidden from her for all those painful weeks. Suddenly a child who had seen too much, I wanted to crawl away and escape the scene, the smell of disinfectant, the trill of that damn flute music that will always, always sing of death to me. I cried knowing there was so much left in life for her to try --
why hadn't I, who quietly shared her vacillating nature, helped her to find what she craved?
And yet my mother, exposed and ready to die, suddenly looked right at me for the first time in weeks, through her stringy hair and straight into my eyes, and held and patted my hand. And she said, her voice gravelly but familiar for one beautiful moment, "It's okay, Jenny. Sweet girl. Don't be sad for me. It's really okay."
And just then it was clear to me, as perhaps it was to her:
She was already playing the part that suited her perfectly
...with no audition, no essay, no special declaration but love. Above all, even when intent on the journey to find herself, she had always made time to be a wonderful mother to me, never failing to wipe away my tears and ease my pain.
It was the one role she could see through to the end.
*~*
