As our mother weakens and I am far away, I begin her passage home from here. We can’t say how many days, weeks, or months so I am starting now. -ML
i
You look
at me
through
the eyes
of a sassy
twenty-one-year-old
in these black and white
portraits of your glory days.
You twinkle
so lively
and alluring.
Your coquettishness
delights me.
I didn’t know you
before you were
our mother
married
and struggling
and then
as a new immigrant
adapting
and lonely.
I didn’t know you
as a woman,
woman-to-woman
to see what
I can see now,
what I know now
about life.
Through your lustrous eyes,
I see a life
I can only imagine.
ii
They phoned me today
that your bedsores
need treatment.
I tell them
to keep you
pain free.
Please.
Your 97-year old
little body
has been slow
to fail
and now
I sense
the closeness
of your next journey.
I hope I can be there for you.
In the meantime,
I will write
love songs.
I imagine
that your heart
and my heart
speak our love
to each other
though I am
far west
to your east,
for I am writing
to your soul
and there
boundaries
are permeable
and unnecessary
and you are close
inside me,
my relationship
with you
personal
private
and only ours –
forever.
This is a liminal time
a time of transition.
We have come
to a threshold.
Let me
carry us
across.
iii
I didn’t know you
before you were
our mother
but you brought
her to me
every day.
Where would
I have been
without your love
of classical music
of singing
of dance
of literature?
You were my hero.
Your calligraphy
so black and crisp
your cartography
each country
delicately filled
with coloured pencils
and sharp boundaries.
Oh, how I stared
at those beautiful
renderings,
each sheet
separated
by tissue paper.
I wanted to be
just like you.
You were artist
business woman
bookkeeper
the one who moved
with elegance
and flamboyance.
You who waited
thirty-three years
and brought
your softest heart
to my birth
to the bond
we formed
when our first
language together
was Spanish.
The woman
who was my hero
for many
childhood years.
She is in me.
Still a hero.
iv
Stories from childhood
are not truths
even though
someone said
our father
made you
quit flamenco
when you got married.
I didn’t like you
saying yes to his no.
We attach ourselves
to these stories
as if they are facts
but like all events
we spin meaning
and judgment
into them
which is only
always the sign
of who we are.
I don’t like
how as adults
it got too easy
to mock
your foibles
and ugly moments
before we learned
how simply human
you were and later
that you had dementia.
Even the doctors
missed that.
Earlier on
we young adults
naturally had to find
our own way.
Some of yours
were significantly
wrong for me,
made it harder
to be together
before I learned
that you can love someone
and not agree with them at all.
I am sorry for not noticing.
I am sorry for being agitated.
I am sorry for wanting you to be different.
I am sorry for telling you how to be
and wishing you would not be angry
until the same things angered me
and I understood you.
I am sorry for not accepting
the way you were
for all the many reasons
and traumas
that I knew
you had sustained
but could not understand
until I did.
Sobering awareness
that comes
only with time –
if you are willing
and if you get lucky.
v
I was lucky today
when your son
and technology
let me see you
sleeping peacefully
in your bed
across the country.
Your eyes fluttered
when I sang
Que Sera Sera
into your ear
the sounds
of your children
chirping and loving you
right by your bedside.
Sleep gently Mama.
Talk to you soon.
