My mother’s doctor called around noon, just a couple hours after the MRI. It had shown what he suspected, that my 88-year-old mother had an infection in her spine. He urged me to get her to the hospital in Burlington, an hour’s drive, right away. How soon can you get going, you don’t want to run into traffic, he said. Traffic. His voice was calm, but that he was worried about a delay of maybe half an hour alarmed me.
On the other side of the closed bedroom door, my mother was overseeing my 14-year-old daughter as she made cookies, pleased to be doing something that felt like the caretaking she’d done most of her life and which, since she could hardly stand and no longer cook, had become mostly impossible for her. They chatted companionably, my daughter proud to be doing something for her grandma, my mother happy that her granddaughter was paying attention to her. It would be their last shared moment in the kitchen of the house where my daughter had been coming since she was a baby.
I scrambled to pack overnight bags for my mother and I, called friends to take care of my daughter. As my mother made her slow, halting way to the car, nudging her walker through the grass, she stopped and looked around at her green yard, lined with day lilies and hydrangeas and the many other flowers she’d carefully planted over the years. “It’s just so beautiful,” she sighed, which she’d been saying, over and over, every time she looked out the window on this summer visit. I looked at her house and felt a chill. I knew this would be the last glimpse, the last time, the last sunny moment my mother would be in the house that had been her sanctuary and home for 34 years, the last time I would be there with her, that her granddaughter would be there with her. The last time that she would see the flowers in her yard. This whole chapter of our lives was ending in the short walk across the lawn. There was no time to say good-bye, no time to think about what this moment meant, to absorb the weight of the departure. Just over, like that.
My mother was in her early 50’s when she bought her house. It was the first time in her life she had a stable place to live that she could call her own. From childhood she’d gone from rental to rental, propelled by poverty…
