Episode I As my mother goes breathing
As remains my calling (!), I continue to spell my brother, David, to take care of my 92 year old mother on Friday or Saturday evenings. He is a longtime Board Member of the Masquer’s Theater in Point Richmond. As pictured above, after dinner, he dawns a flashy shirt and tie and goes off to sell raffle tickets to the folks in line before the play begins. When we finish our dinner of Swedish meatballs, my mom and I continue sitting at the kitchen table. Without the sound on, I keep an eye on the television and the Celtics/Pistons play-off game. (During the College and NBA play-offs I become a basketball fanatic. On the table, however, I have a big thick copy of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems. As most always, unless the poems are too sad, my mother welcomes the opportunity to hear me read aloud. Last week, I read Moore’s poem, The Steeple-Jack, much to her pleasure. It is also favorite Moore poem of mine. I remember when I first read the poem in 1960. It was in a small paperback anthology that I took to Paris for my junior year at the Sorbonne. It was a cloudy, almost rainy day and I was standing still on the sidewalk in a line of students waiting to get into the University restaurant for lunch. A perfect weather for the gray, seaside New England village pictured in the poem:
Durrer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at: with sweet sea air coming into your house
in a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
Though I can no longer stir my mom to write an intentional poem, she often becomes critically attentive and much more alert when I read her poetrt. I suspect it is the rhythm and tightened formal structure of language that makes her want to listen closely. She seems to empathetically move right to the inside to whatever the piece. Usually, while her concentration is close, I ask for a comment after each stanza.
“It’s kind of exotic.” Her instant critical response takes me by surprise. I always liked Moore’s opening. Indeed, I believe my mother is possessed of a righteous, empirically biased background and one that I parallel with Marianne Moore’s sense of both factual and imaginative precision. And here is my mother, and now I think quite rightly in this stanza, pointing out that Moore the poem’s setting a gratuitious ‘exotic’ tableau - Durrer and the whales with those finely ‘etched’ waves, etc. It’s as if my mother is implicity reprimanding Moore; the poet is making the poem’s envelope too pretty - the town and seascape ought to be presented in a both severe and modest manner. Yes, my mother - descendant of New England and west coast ship-builders - implies that the poet ought watch her manners and not make pretty where pretty won’t do. Don’t hedge on the harsh!
Ironically, my mother’s maiden name is Moore.
She announces that she wants to go to bed. I am happy about that. I can see the rest of the basketball game, which is a good, well fought one! I put her under her covers, give her eye drops, and wish her a goodnight.
“I enjoyed this evening very much,” she tells me, once she is in bed. She always likes to hear poems, which pleases me, as well. I rush to the back room and watch the rest of the game. It’s over at nine. I turn off the Television. “Help me. Would somebody help me?” I hear her voice through the audio-surveillance system that David has set up between the rooms. I rush to the bedroom. I turn on the light. She is gripping the handrail on her bed as if she wants out.
“Someone needs to take care of my family. They are all out.” Her eyes are wide open, agitated.
“We’re fine, Mom. Not to worry. It’s time to go to sleep.” She lets her head fall back, and looks at me intently.
“Well, what are you doing with your life?”
“I am a poet, an artist, a photographer, a maker of books.”
“That’s all well and good but tell me why are you gaining ten pounds everyday? It does not look good.”
I am embarassed. I have gained weight.
“I am working on loosing it, Mom.”
“Well, won’t you?”
“Yes, Mom. Now it’s time to go to sleep. Can you close your eyes and pretend you are a bird flying high in the sky going off to a special place full of dreams?”
She closes her eyes and does not answer. I shut off the light and go back to the television to see the analysis of the Celtics’ defeat of the Pistons. Before I can sit down I hear her voice again through the audio-transmitter.
“Help me. Will someone help me?”
I go back. I don’t turn on her light. I see her face framed by angle of the hall light. Relieved, I think, to see me, her head lifts a little, while her eyes rise like intense, brown marbles. She does seem truly frightened. Her lips are tighened in a way that I know she is about to ask a hard question, and that she will expect an appropriate answer. In a perfectly firm voice she asks, “Can you tell me the implications of all of this?”
It’s as if she lying on a platform and has been looking up hard into some ultimate, existential darkness - one that we each, no doubt, will inevitably face or confront.
Can you tell me the implications of all of this?
I suspect Samuel Beckett would have loved a question like this.
“Try to close your eyes and dream, Mom. Pretend that you are a whale and you are going way down into the darkest depth of the ocean. And think of all the pretty fish that you will see!
She closes her eyes and I leave the room quickly. It’s time for me to go back home.
Episode II - As my mother goes breathing
Last night, again, I took care of my mom. Already, during dinner, even though she chews her chicken pieces, rice and carrots with vigor, she seems quite sleepy and/or spaced out. Yet, when we finish, she says yes, when I ask if she wants to hear some poems. I have been back to reading to her from Marianne Moore’s Collected. Tonight it is two poems with which I am not familiar - “Sojourn in the Whale” and “When I Buy Pictures.” After each one, when I ask her if she likes the particular poems, she makes a barely audible yes. While I was reading, she makes an also barely audible hum, in response to the language.
She clearly wants to lie down to sleep. I pull her up by her hands from her chair to lead her to the bathroom. It’s getting harder for her to rise, and her legs have become weaker. She asks to sit down again.
“Are you alright?”
“I am dying down to my waist,” she says. She sounds like she is perhaps totally conscious of some process of death beginning to claim her body. Or, alternatively, now lack the words, she wants to say her lower back aches. To help any tightness, I rub her lower back for a short while.
I get her to rise again. Firm footed, I hold her hands to help guide her walk. Without moving her feet, she clears her throat, looks me in the eye and says, “It is hard work.”
“What is hard work, Mom?”
“Dying.”
Again, she seems to have a total clarity as to what’s up. As much as she often makes it clear that she wants be on her way out of this life, she realizes the gods will give her no short-cuts.
I manage to get her into bed. She seems more than ready to start falling to sleep. I turn out the lights and retreat to the Family Room where I can listen to her sounds through a walkie-surveillance system. I take out a blank accordion-fold book:
The last time I was here, I finished two panels of a new series, As My Mother Goes Breathing.. She is much less anguished then last week durng which I my haptic was responding to an endless purge of dark moans. It was painful to regiser her plight. Yet, as tonight’s breathing progresses, particularly as she exhales, each breath is accompanied by a sing-song moan, rising and trailing off. Perhaps I am hearing a lament, or, perhaps, just a letting go. What’s curious, almost rhapsodic - since her bedroom window is opened - the moans are mixed with the sounds of City (Richmond) to which she gave and staked so much of her public life. The paced bellowing wail of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe freight trains; the piercing whistle of the mocking bird on the house roof, under which a flock of birds chirp while the sun descends; an occasional siren, the acceleration of a car, then two.
As I listen and let my pen respond to these various sounds, it’s odd to imagine a whole town in which most of its citizens are oblivious to the gradual letting go of one of its own, particularly my mother, a once distinguished public figure who was once so important to the making of its civic life. Where, in another culture or time, the dying of an important figure would draw in the sympathetic response of an entire community. It is said, for example, the African-American gospel, Swing Low Sweet Chariot has its origins in a West African village. When it came time for a Chief, and maybe anybody else, to die, the community would put the person in a canoe above a steep waterfall. As the vessel approached the falls, a choir of voices would sing out as if to call down he deities to pick up the death-craft as it falls and take it way to the realm of the ancestors.
Who knows, beyond myself this evening, who is listening to the call of my mom?
