Many years back, when I was still in high school, I bought my mom a copy of Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert In Central Park. She was a fan, and is the reason I love their music so much now. I only knew some of the songs then, but we’d both sing along with it.
One day, in a moment of uncharacteristic crassness, my mom turned up the volume on one of these songs as it began, and told me, “You’ll appreciate this song!”
Paul Simon began singing,
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall
She was right, I did appreciate the song, and the smile it brought to her face as she commiserated. Mom was always the understanding one, the one you believed used to be a Real Life Teenager, Way Back When. She was the one who enjoyed rock music- even though it mostly consisted of Barry Manilow, but strayed as far as Journey.
She would do cartwheels with us until a slipped disk began her life of back pain. Regardless, she always laughed, and was obsessed with keeping everyone happy and having fun.
Her last ten years have not been happy. She has been battling cancer which pops up here and there, travelling all over her body, and most recently in her brain. This time, it will win. It’s already destroyed her memory. It keeps her in pain. It confuses her and keeps her lost, even sitting on her own couch. It’s exactly what you don’t want to have happen to you before you die.
I left the midwest to live in Oklahoma in 1992, and aside from a few summers, have lived mostly there for 16 years, the longest I’ve ever lived in any place, and so far away from home. I’ve spent so much time away from my family that every visit back seems to age everyone considerably. My mom’s changes have been most dramatic, thank you cancer. She has often been tired and sick. When her hair grew back after chemo, it was thinner and fully gray. She fought cancer like the Boxer that Paul Simon sings about. After changes upon changes, she was more or less the same. She was still witty and lively – as long as she had the energy. But when I saw her in June, she was losing that as well. Shortly afterwards, my sister Amie told me, she really lost that spark, and she wasn’t mom as much anymore.
I guess we see our own mortality in our parents. When you get old enough, you recognize that your parents were once like you, and eventually they became like them, and that you, too, will become like your future self as your kids become like you are now. The path is laid out ahead of you, like it or not.
With every visit over the last several years, as everyone aged and I just keep being me (on the inside, anyway), there grew a distance between reality and memory. I still see myself, as Sharon said recently, continuously age 25 – I’m old enough to drink, young enough not to be “sir,” no matter what kids these days think of me. My mom should still be the way she was when I went off to college – gardening, reading, laughing, and certainly not old, sick, or hospitalized.
My sisters (one living close to mom, the other several hours away) have had more time with mom while she went through this. They could see the changes, although they were no easier to watch up close. For me, it was like watching a movie where you kept skipping ahead. You get to the next scene, and suddenly you realize how much you passed up. My memory seemed more true, and the pictures in my mind held the real Mom for me. The nice bright colors, the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day – momma don’t take my Kodachrome away.
But the truth is what it is, regardless of whether you wish it were different. Mom is fading. Her chemo will stop, and the focus will be on making her comfortable, whatever that means. There’s no telling what will happen now, other than the eventual conclusion of it all. We all know that she’ll never be “herself” again. No one gets a schedule for these things. Even anticipated death comes as a surprise. And what do you wish for – that it come quickly, or that it wait a while longer?
There’s no difference between today and yesterday, except just admitting and accepting the way things are today. My mom still lives in my memory different than the way she lives in Ohio. Absence helps the myth live on. She should still be the one who listens to music with me, and not the one who gets confused about whether the TV show is her real life. You can’t choose which pictures you get to keep. They all stay with you until you get no more. The oldest ones fade in the presence of the newest.
Reality can never match my sweet imagination. Everything looks better in black and white.
