I'm thinking of the Paul McCartney song, written in India, March 1968 and featured on his 1970 release "McCartney", later on "Anthology 3", covered beautifully by John Denver and for me, heard for the first time in the film, Jerry McGuire.
But that's not what this piece is about. That was just a clever way for me to divert myself from writing about the Burt Bee's pomegranate lip balm that is sitting on my dining room table. The tube I had dropped in the wooden bowl by my front door, ready to be applied before I left the house. The same tube that I sent to my mother in a care package and found by her bed when my sister and I cleaned out her bedroom. I struggle to remember her bedside table, the thick cotton doily and lamp. The Milagros and just …stuff. Stuff that anyone keeps on a bedside table.
My brother Philip and I stayed for an additional five days I think. Honestly, I would have to go back through my records because the time span was such a blur. It was simultaneously so slow moving and fast. We had contacted cousins about family items like furniture, old letters and records from ancestors, Grandma Sue's Quimper, and dutifully boxed them up and shipped them where they were supposed to go. We gathered her many Laurel Burch cat earrings and disbursed them during an informal gathering of her Lunch Bunch friends.
I packed up home goods, such as the lip balm, Dove body wash, the coconut oil my brother brought with him from Hawaii, thinking, “why let them go to waste?” but now I see it was a way to hang on to her.
There are miscellaneous odds and ends I might find in a drawer or I've moved them from the dining room table, or back to a box to sort through, making a slow progression of the house. A cache of prescription drugs, her wallet, her flip phone, check book, keys to her house on a leather fob that belonged to my dad. Other things I cannot bring myself to go through that sit in my basement. My sister has the bulk of her things that we kept, in her own basement. We get together often, and I'll say, "Let's go through that stuff" but it hasn't happened yet.
I hung on to the empty jar of coconut oil for a while. I can see Philip rubbing it lovingly into her hands, as if willing her to wake up and get to right again. I recycle these containers hesitantly. That these mere objects would be reminders of her, and not something more substantial is odd to me. I thought about it while I moved the empty Burt's Bees balm the dining room table. The label has rubbed off, but the bright red top resembles a signal siren. It's those last vestiges, the last things she touched.
Sitting with
these is a scrap of paper with her handwriting '"The Ballad of Ramblin'
Jack" about Jack Elliot'. I remember the conversation. We were
all together for my niece’s wedding in Virginia, maybe eight years ago. I had gone to Pete Seeger's
80th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden. I
called her from the floor where we had tickets. During this conversation, she
revealed a grudge she was nursing toward Bob Dylan. When I search my memory, he is not part of the vast variety of music that filled
our house, nor did I find any of his records among my father's 1200 +
collection. It seems her suspicious seeds had cracked, and Jack Elliot
was indeed the real deal, not Dylan. During the conversation, she couldn't
remember the film she had seen but promised to find it and send to me, and
within a week, there it was in the mail.Why I still have this scrap of paper, I don't know, I found it tucked in the filofax I've recently taken to using again
You see if I don't write down these memories, I know they will fade. I feel like the past year was a blur already.
Next to that note, is a large pink sheet of notepaper that starts with "Begin each day with thoughts that bring out the best in you" trimmed in affirmations "Today I will..." "Yes, I can..." "I am grateful for...”. Notepaper and sticky notes were a favorite stocking stuffer of hers. My scribbles this time cover the page...'she will be able to move home, but she's not walking - to fly needs wheelchair, next two weeks special care'. This must have been after my conversation with one of the many rotating doctors in Albuquerque, when the four of us kids were discussing what and where and how the future of Mom would be. We didn't begrudge her for moving to New Mexico. In fact, she knew it was her happy place, where her heart was. Like other women of her generation, I suppose, she learned to really listen to her heart after the grief of widowhood, the depression of having a Georgetown education and not doing anything with it, the realization that you are on the other side of life, you're in the twilight years, but you're fighting like hell against accepting it. This didn't happen in a short period of time, it happened over a period of eight or more years. During that entire time, I never saw her cry about my father once. Not once. Stoic Iowan or following the river of denial, I do not know.
We had to do recon work, after being chastised by one of her friends. They knew something but we didn’t. My mother would not speak of her health, she lied, she was reluctant to give me her doctor’s information, finally handing over the phone number of the P.A. she had been seeing for years, someone who’s name begins with a “J” who I had the most difficult time getting in touch with and when I finally spoke with her, in the back entrance yard of my mother’s, sitting at the picnic table in front of her outdoor fire place, the sun not yet blazing down, my mother asleep in inside, she didn’t tell me my mother was dying, she only sighed “I know, it’s so sad when our parents get old”.
I knew she was dying, I didn't want to believe it, nor did I want to sit down later that night, in the dark with the glow of my laptop staring at me, to write my brothers and sister my discoveries from that visit and my knowledge, but I did. My mother hadn't lost the sharpness in her tongue, defensively demanding, “What are you doing here? I’m fine!” which I knew was a cover up for her fear, because when I drove up on March 8th at 10 PM, she was waiting for me at the door, with a look in her eyes and her arms open wide.
She was at that time, I think I put it, about 80%. It was hard for her to get around, she needed someone to come in and help her. It wasn't clear whether she should be driving. The house was a mess. My friend Nancy came up and helped me to give everything a deep clean, and bring all of the unnecessary things to her storage unit, where they would suffer the dust that blew in underneath during the New Mexico windy season. "I’m not going anywhere!" she'd cry from her bedroom, or her seat at the kitchen table. Nancy and I would just turn to each other and give a smile, but it was hard. So hard.
The lip balm is almost finished. I'm scraping it out with my right pointer finger. I'm loath to toss it. These things she touched, so near the end. I just can't.
