This was the week that was! (You're probably too young to remember a TV show from the early 1960s by a similar name...) Can we please return to normal now? Oh, but what exactly is the new normal? Let me mull that one for a bit...
The Hospice team calls me in the morning. Oh-oh, did I forget something? Do they want me to come back and pick up a missed item that I should have known to take with me? Missed a paper to sign (even as I signed so many!)? I've never walked that path from Hospice to death before. But, they merely say to me -- we're here for you. Are you alright? How good they are to have no expectations! Just concern. (And to have a staff person charged with looking after the ones left behind. I'm not in need of help. No, not at all. Maybe a sleeping pill next time I try to get a good night's rest, but that's it. But I surely know that a family death can leave behind shattered lives. Hospice is there for them. How good is that!)
I get up, I walk through the drying garden, feed the animals..
Eat breakfast with Ed. We have this argument going: how do you best eat a frozen croissant. I say you have to reheat it in the oven for twelve minutes. He says in the microwave for 50 seconds. I am so tired of making decisions this morning that I tell him -- oh, go ahead and wave it! And it is just fine. Different, but fine.
I suppose this is the way I would describe my day today -- different, but fine.
I talk to my sister then. Poor thing -- it's her mother too and she has to process it all at a distance. In a way, that's harder. You're left not with things to do, affairs to put in order, but with your own thoughts and memories. Our mother, strong personality that she was, had an impact, even on those who lived far from her. An indirect influence is still an influence. My mom was an enduring subject of our conversations, even in our senior years. You have to shuffle things around a bit now. She is no longer here. All that was her is in the past. You are free, unburdened, but also alone. You're not reacting, you are forging ahead without the barricades, if not necessarily the guardrails of her oversight. But wide open paths can feel uncomfortably strange, too.
So we talk about all that, about these last months. I walk her through the events once again and eventually that's done, and I hang up, and I have an hour, (or is it two?) to stand there with a hose to water the tubs. That's how you move to regular old life: you notice on your morning walk that some annual plants are drooping, you go out and stand with a hose over each one and that takes up the rest of your morning.
And still, it's all so fresh. I think about how strange it is to be suddenly without the daily emails, the clockwork phone calls, nearly every one ending with me saying -- I'm sorry you had such a rotten day. I used to think -- I sound like that kid book, "Alexander and the Terrible Rotten Horrible No Good Very Bad Day," on repeat! A steady stream of mostly unsolvable issues that my mother generated as regularly as a machine throwing out tennis balls at you. Her life's burdens haunted me since before Covid. Five years of intense mothering of my mother. Done now. So weird...
But I also accept now what I could not accept before -- that perhaps all these years, she was okay. Ed always claimed she thrived on discontent. She got places that way. So maybe she was okay all these last years, with her illicit candy bars, her solo meals in the dining room (she did not want to listen to "other people's problems"), her puzzle doing in the lounge, even as nasty others messed things up there. She was a city girl (Detroit, D.C., New York, Warsaw, New York again) and plant life in the village where we, her kids lived, and then summered with her parents, did not interest her much, but in her assisted living room, she would look out the window and admired the tubs of flowers planted in the courtyard. She developed a theoretical love of nature then. I say theoretical, because really, it was all out the window. (Besides, she disliked Wisconsin. Both my parents did. My dad on his last visit here in maybe 1983 or 1985 -- he died in 2013 -- took a walk with me in the suburbs where I lived and asked -- you really want to spend the rest of your life in this town?) My mom, city girl, telling me now in her late nineties -- it's good that you touch the dirt and bring yourself closer to the earth out there on the farmette. (But not so good that she ever wanted to visit me at the farmhouse. Freshly moved from California, she resisted getting too close to my life with Ed. She lived fifteen minutes away and still she came here just once. To show a friend where I lived.)
I put the hose down. It's time for the kids.
The two older ones had "picture day" today in school. I smile at how important this is, even now, in the days of so many cameras, phones, taking videos and pics daily! Both chose their outfits with care, Sparrow upset yesterday because he couldn't find a bracelet he wanted for picture day (Sparrow, the camera wont catch your wrist! I dont care! It's for good luck!), Snowdrop, frustrated with the directive to please comb your hair with more care today. I get them of course in the hours after, when the hair is once again tussled and bracelets are misplaced, but still, this was the day and this is how they looked, in September of 2024, he in 1st grade, she in 4th, on picture day!
(with the water bottle carrier he sewed yesterday in sewing class)
Snowdrop has her violin lesson later this afternoon, so we adjust our schedules for that and I drop them off at the new Friday drop off point and now I have just the quiet of farmette life, on a beautiful evening of mid September.
Ed is out examining an old truck somewhere. I go for a walk. If I learned anything at all in the last months it is that sitting on your butt is a surefire way to melancholy and physical decline. My mother's sudden rapid downturn is absolutely linked to her stubborn refusal to move out of her recliner once I transferred her to the nursing care facility. However content she was in her discontent before, it all collapsed for her once she refused to get up and out of her chair. So tonight, I resume my walks. A bike ride tomorrow? Sounds nice...
Prairie grasses, drying landscapes, sounds of birds. So beautiful, all of it....
with so much love...
