Last night in the shower, my mother’s legs flashed into my mind, vivid like I had just lifted a sheet from her bed to view them. Swollen with edema, giving a fine sheen to her skin, her many bruises in hologram like technicolor. I could almost touch them. Another flash. Her face, still, tilted, grey hair on her pillow, her former double chin sloping a new angle to join her face and neck into a single construct — eyes closed, then open, looking at me, brown, one eye smaller than the other, narrowed from 30 year old retinal damage. The flashes came unbidden, like machine gun fire waking up neurons in my brain that I’d soothed to sleep 3 years ago with life’s distractions. I didn’t want to stop them, there she was, so close, just outside of my shower, just there, a blink away, thrown so suddenly into my mind that it felt like a visitation. The spray hit my face as I wondered what her message could be. I closed my eyes, let the warm wet pour over me, face lifted for more. There I was a young girl on the carpet of my father’s study, this flash familiar less distinct, blurred in the framing, trying to tie my mother’s shoes on her puffy 35 year old feet. She has on panty hose for socks, slacks pulled up for the job of tying her leather wingtip shoes, black and tan, the laces a thin tight cord. I remember the smell of the leather, the size of her feet (so much smaller than I’ll ever see them again), the overwhelming worshipful love I feel for her. It’s the same era that I became obsessed with a fear of her dying. I would ride with her wherever she went, I would chase after her car when she tried to flee the swelling misery of our home, I would make her describe the spot where she would meet me in heaven.
Oh how sad that little girl would be to know that at 42 she would cling to flashes of a bruised swollen leg, a sleeping face of memorized peaks and valleys rising from a swarm of soft grey hair with flakes of dry skin resting on each strand, shading the black flecks of the woman she used to be, just so she could see her mother again. The 42 year old, she knows this is life and has friends who have also lost their parents. She knows the final years of her mother’s life, in bed, in pain. She knows the in between years of anger and distance. But that little girl, deep deep in the recesses of my mind, her worst fears are realized — she has lost her mommy. I let her grieve sometimes, as I tell it's all right.
