Mother’s Day: In honor of my mother, and in loving memory of my friend Beth, I’m posting a reflective essay I wrote five years ago, a few months before Beth died at age 88. She was quite a firecracker.
My friend Beth
My friend Beth was crying yesterday. She sat in her comfortable green recliner, her last remaining possession, and cried; not the self-conscious tears of trying not to be a bother, not the self-pitying tears of a disappointed child – but honest, innocent tears of confusion and grief. The nurse came in to give her her medicine, crushed in a spoonful of applesauce, a small white paper cup of water for a chaser. “Are you all right, dear?” she asked.
“This is my friend,” Beth smiled through her tears, and patted my hand. Her freshly cut silver hair bobbed against her cheek.
She was immediately distracted by an advertisement for cat food on the muted television which was always on. “There it is! You see! I told you!” she laughed now, and pointed to the jumping kitten on the screen. I had no idea what she was talking about. The nurse moved on to the bed next door.
She has dainty, manicured fingers and translucent skin. Her fingers flutter as she gently brushes her thick bangs to one side and pats her hair. “The little girl, she was there,” she turned to me – the kitten and her tears, both forgotten – her green eyes, soft with eager hope. “She was there, right there,” she says, hugging herself with girlish delight. Suddenly her twinkling eyes lose their light and turn dark once again. “They came, but they made me stay. I was so mad!” Her small thin-skinned fingers curl into fists, and she is ready to start punching the air, twisting about in her chair. She has been like this before. I think she is remembering a foster child she cared for briefly, years and years ago, long before I knew her. She never realized it was temporary care and the little girl was not to be her own. When they took the girl away, Beth broke down in hysterics and had to be restrained in the hospital for several weeks, so I was told. Beth never spoke of it. Now, her lower lip trembles, and a sound like a muffled wail comes up from the depth of her soul. “And Bud doesn’t come,” and she is in tears again. “I want to go home.” She is crying softly, bewildered. “I want to go home.”
She looks old, and tired. Home. Her little one bedroom bungalow where she lived for 65 years, first with her fresh, young husband, a worker on the railroad who died without giving her any children, then, with her blind, diabetic mother. Then alone, feisty and fiercely independent, taking in sewing, creating and selling beautiful quilts out of her tiny garage turned into a tidy studio. She was the Avon Lady, and was known by everyone in our small town. She could carry on both sides of any conversation, with wit and laughter, and shared her mighty opinions freely with no one in particular – the grocer, the pharmacist, newspaper carrier, mail person, town clerk, town manager, chief of police, pastor, and the senior citizens in her quilting club or the customers in her little shop. She composted and dug and planted her own gardens every year until she was 83 and couldn’t remember any longer how to pay her utility bill, or remember to put the milk away in the refrigerator instead of the closet.
As we cleaned out her little house and reluctantly moved her into the nursing home, we began to discover she had not been functioning well for much longer than anybody realized. With sad affection we found the envelope, stuffed with every kind of colorful advertisement along with the overdue phone bill, and every square inch covered in postage stamps as though she knew she had to mail something but couldn’t quite remember how to go about it. We found the shoes, lined up in the kitchen cupboard, and stacks of unopened mail stuffed in the dirty laundry basket. The last months of Beth’s creeping apprehension about leaving her house began to make sense.
Her little home has been sold, the proceeds going to her only brother, Bud, who lives far away and doesn’t care; he has a life and worries of his own. He arrived soon after we alerted him that Beth wasn’t well. He stayed about a week, had Beth sign the deed to the house in his name and empty her savings account, and then he went home again. My husband JR manages her social security check, to pay for her medication and the nursing home bill each month.
At first, Beth had many visitors, friends and neighbors, curious. Even Bud came to see her once, and sometimes used to call her on a Sunday afternoon. But now, she has faithful visits from one dear long-time friend, Joan, who manages her health care; and me and JR.
My heart fills with sorrow and wants to break, when she cries with such genuine confusion and pain. Of course she wants to go home. To go someplace where things are right again, and familiar, and personal. To have meaningful and satisfying work to do, and conversations that make sense. To a small world that is her own world, where she is known and she matters.
Now, she cries alone in her green chair, staring at concrete walls and a droning television, day after long day. And although she doesn’t remember that a book can be opened, that there are words and pictures on the inside, she does know that Bud doesn’t come, that she isn’t at home. I try to imagine a very alive soul’s conscious ache for connection, still burning, when the capacity has been snuffed out. It’s a prison I cannot bear for long.
A small black leather trunk sits in my attic; Beth’s mother’s name is stenciled near the latch. It holds the precious memories of a life. There is a photograph of two men in uniform; I recognize Bud and Beth’s husband, standing proudly beside the hibiscus bush that still blooms at the corner of the little bungalow. A framed childhood photograph of Beth, precocious in her long ringlets and big hair ribbon, seated on a chair with her legs dangling in thick white stockings, trim black boots crossed at the ankle. Her grandmother’s marriage certificate dated 1878, in bold, colorful calligraphy. Two ticket stubs for Beth and her mother from the last train ride ever between Woodstock and the Junction, before the rail line was terminated and turned into a highway. A small catalogue of products from the woolen mill where Beth worked alongside her mother while the men were in the war, before it was closed down and turned into a boutique mall. There is a half-used booklet of yellowed WWII food ration stamps. There is a program for a long-forgotten school concert, Beth’s name listed as a participant. There are stacks of photographs, of people who once mattered.
This is a mother’s trunk – keep-saking the reminders of a life stored in a mother’s heart. I see only these bits and pieces of the story of Beth’s life, gone now and long forgotten. But these were once held dear by the very one who knew the life, the hope, the yearnings, the celebrations, the joys, contained in each memento. The one who carried this life in her body, and then carried this life in her heart, lovingly kept these treasures as a precious reminder of the child she knew and loved.
There is a secret, divine domain within a mother’s heart, to contain and comprehend the measure of a child. Though she has birthed and nursed and ultimately released this other, separate being, still the cells of her body recognize, yearn for (and all too often fail at nurturing) the whole potential inherent in her child. It is from this secret place that she saves the remnants of the life she still carries, somewhere, within her.
Her own mother has been long gone, and Beth herself is a child again. The little black trunk holds some of her story, but who holds her measure? Who can hold onto the hope for her, can see all that she is, in her deepest self, since she is no longer able to see it for herself? Who will see her glory? For what else could Goldmund have meant, when he said “How will you die, Narcissus, when your turn comes; for you have no mother?” Narcissus had only himself; and in the end, it isn’t enough.
Her friend Joan and I, in a small way, are mothers now to Beth. But her soul knows. Her soul knows even as her mind does not, that her longing to be known is as deep as life itself. It is no small thing that she wants to go home again. There is nowhere else to go. In the end, perhaps, the best we can offer, all of us, is to honor and marvel at the measure of another. Maybe in some way this, too, is our discipleship of ‘loving one another’. And maybe Jesus was also thinking of his beloved John when he said, of Mary, “This is your mother.”
Beth with her mother, Mamie
Woodstock, Vermont 1922
My Mother Romi, 1949
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There have been two or three times in my life when I’ve actually felt “pretty”. And I’ve been called, more than once, “cute’. Now, cute may be flattering when you’re eight years old, and maybe again when you’re 80, but when you’re in your middle years, mature and lovely, “cute” is not what you want to hear.
