Mother’s Little Helpers

If a young friend happens to ask me, I tell them you either fall prey gradually to the ravages of time or you bear the crush of eons in a very brief span. The choice is not yours. But sometimes it is.

One night I intercepted my mother before she walked down the stairs. She looked as beautiful as ever. She wore a dark blue skirt, a salt-white blouse and modest, heeled shoes to match the skirt. But a few things were out of whack. She wore lipstick, rouge and eye makeup. She hadn't done up her face like that in a long time, if ever. And the clock read three-thirty in the morning.

“Mom! What are you doing? You gotta get back to bed. It’s the middle of the night!” I was groggy. I had to get up for work in three hours.

She giggled. Her eyes flashed guilt that could only hatch from complete innocence. She scooted back in her room like a brazen little kid. And I couldn’t comprehend how she moved so quickly. Her walker had never left her bedside.

“I have to go to school,” she protested. “And I’m going to be late. My mother will be mad.”

“How about you stay home today, Anne? It’s supposed to snow. They’ll probably cancel school.”

After some restlessness, she drifted back to sleep.

For nearly six decades, she was my mom. Embracing me. Encouraging me. Lecturing me far past a time when you’d assume I was old enough to know better. The roles had now reversed. I was the parent, and she was a child, in a manner of speaking. And it made me uncomfortable. What would my 57-year-old mother think if she could see the future? If she saw how I now supervised her as if she were that schoolgirl without the ribbons in her hair?

The last two years of my mom's life wore on me. Taking turns with my sister we spent every night and day at our mother's house. The only other caretakers were some kindly women who during the day gave my sibling a break here and there. At the funeral lunch, some people said what a noble thing I’d done. They didn’t know that many nights I wished I were somewhere else other than in my childhood home emotionally jousting with my aging mother. Many times I lost patience with her. A few times I got angry. This was not the approach she took when caring for suffering family members. The memories of my mindset on some of those days, they still trouble me.

Toward the end of her life, she’d become suspicious and grow quiet as night fell. Some things that once gave her joy now challenged her.

A couple years before, I’d visit when her mind was much sharper. We’d revert to the same old splendid habits we’d formed through the years—one particular tradition passed down by her father.

“You should know this one, Thom-ass,” she said. “Seventy-eight across. ‘Baseball player of old’. Three letters, begins with O.”

“That’s Ott, mom. O-T-T. Mel Ott. He was hitting home runs for the Giants back when you were sweet sixteen.”

She knew that answer. She’d seen that specific clue in her crosswords a thousand times. But banding together to solve a finite puzzle was smoother than broaching more riddling issues like money problems or kid problems or the always delicate topic about why my Catholic faith had wavered.

On Sunday nights or maybe midweek, depending on the degree of difficulty, without saying a word she’d wink at me and toss a folded-up newspaper on my lap. Completing the New York Times crossword was always a reason to celebrate. Toward that end, we’d rustle up some cookies or candy and ease our way into those most sensitive subjects.

So it was another evening a couple years later after her mental capacities diminished that I fed my mother a Nutty Buddy for dinner. My sister Molly would call and ask what nutritious meal I prepared, and I’d lie like a rug. I figured if my mom didn’t want to eat chicken and potatoes, then what harm would ice cream for supper do at age ninety-one. I ate some, too. And besides, only doctors took that oath: “First, do no harm.” But their answer to her diagnoses had always been more pills. A tablet for this ache and a capsule for that anxiety. There were eight daily medications in total to be taken twice per day, the way big pharma likes it. There was also John Denver and Willie Nelson and Luciano Pavarotti along with the ice cream. Music and sweet stuff were the best medicines. They made her as happy as anything. I favored those little fugitive doses of joy. Chemicals from a lab, at any stage of life, could never do for my mom what Annie’s Song could.

After the ice cream dinner, I pulled out my laptop. I had a midnight deadline. From the corner of my eye, I watched my mom shuffle through the pages of a crossword puzzle magazine Molly bought for her. The newspaper versions had been swapped out for those large-print books that were easier to read and simpler to solve. This night, she only turned pages, landing on none. It seemed as if she were viewing one of those self-produced stick figure movies school children bring to life in the margins of a paperback. She flicked from front cover to back. Back cover to front. Turning through pages of the past. And turning gently, gently away. That evening I knew she’d lost the ability to pencil in letters and thoughts and answers in clean squares opposing small black blocks of time and memory. In that detonating realization, my sadness found its prominence amid her decline.

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You think about a lot on the last night of your mother’s life. I first thought about my dead father in a smiling spectral form and my dead brother: long, long gone. And then whether some spiritual reunion among all of them will take place in the cosmos. I continued to doubt things I’d unyieldingly believed in the first couple decades of life, like my skeptical namesake, he who insisted on placing his finger in the wound before his faith was restored. I wondered also: Does paradise even exist?

What you don’t think about—what you can’t picture at fifty-seven years of age is the paradox that sometimes besets youth despite youth’s celebrated status. A time of life that otherwise appears spotless and enviable to an aging man whose halcyon days have darted away like a minnow from a muskellunge.

There’d been this young man gaining on my mom and me that night in the hospital's slipstream, behind those entering the world and others headed out of it. This handsome kid walked into my mom’s room that final evening. He wore blue scrubs. His dark eyes shot diamond flecks into the dim machine light. He sported an impeccably groomed beard. He had tattoos on his arms—simple letters and symbols, if I recall correctly. I thought they might have been a silent ode offered to a world he couldn’t see or touch from that which he could.

It was almost midnight and the previous nurse had clocked out. She’d done her job but I could discern things from her weary face and hurried steps. The health system that employed her placed more emphasis on the health of its balance sheet than the welfare of its employees.

“Hi. Mr. Tracy?

“Yeah. That’s me. Call me Thom. Anne’s my mom.”

“Okay. I’ll be your mom’s nurse for tonight,” the man said. “My name’s ____.”

“Hey, man. How’s it goin’?”

“Not bad. Hoping for a quiet night. Can I get you anything?”

“Nah, I’m okay for now. Unless you wanna get me the last twenty years back.” I chuckled. He did the same.

“I wish I could do that for a lot of people. But if there’s anything else you need, just let me know.”

“She’s ninety-one,” I said to myself as much as to him. I stared out one of those large bleak hospital-room windows through which I saw nothing. “She had a long run. She had a lot of heartache but she had a good life.”

“I've seen a lot in here. Twenty-one. Ninety-one. It all hurts when you lose someone. But you know what, people you love never really leave you.”

He’d said a lot more that I would have written down if I knew then what I know now. I can’t remember many specific words but he made me feel better about a bad situation. This young man brought me food. Real food. He pilfered a sandwich from the employee cafeteria. He brought me water. He gave me comfort. When I said two wooden hospital chairs would do just fine for sleep during the rest of the night, he scoffed. He wheeled in a recliner with a pillow and a blanket. He checked on us more often than his routine rounds required. When he looked at my mom, his gaze transcended the quick clinical glances I’d seen from a few other overworked practitioners. Maybe in the face of my children's grandmother he saw a trace of his own. He knew there was nothing in the medical sense he could do for my mother. But he could make things tolerable for me. Professional training aside, I wondered how he developed composure and compassion of that magnitude. It doesn’t suddenly materialize in many twenty-three-year-old folks. It was as if he’d plucked these attributes from somewhere else in the universe, outside a radius anyone can measure. It was as if he was working his way backwards through the great destroyer we refer to as time.

His shift ended before my mom died later that morning.

A few months after my mom passed, I scrolled through a social media platform. You must realize the irony. This is a medium I use but complain bitterly about since it’s sucked spirituality and truth and beauty from so many young and not-so-young lives. Some believe all they read on the internet. Some appear guided by it. Some yearn for the wondrous lives of the Instagram glitterati. Me? I've become tenuously connected to people I’d met for a scant minute and then some people— I'm not sure if I've ever met them at all. But somehow I can't look away.

In this browsing session, I stopped on a picture. It revealed this smiling young kid above a crowd funding request. I stared at the photo for a while. And then it hit me. I recognized this young man holding a baby. He showed me that same picture on the last night of my mom’s life, not long before the last day of his own. It was this beautiful spirit who helped me ease my mom into the mystic.

If I may—I think along epochal journeys he couldn’t recall, a proverbial old, burdened soul such as his had felt too much and seen enough. Enough of what, I can’t say. I’m not sure anyone could.