<\/div>\n
In the dark of the morning, I sit in the cold, listening to the faraway, echoing horn of a train. It\u2019s 3:30 AM, my rising time\u2014by habit and need.<\/p>\n
My mother sleeps in my living room, slowly dying of self-neglect and petulance, and there\u2019s nothing I can do. There\u2019s nothing that her many doctors, visiting nurses, CNAs, and physical therapists can do. She makes her choices, refusing advice, urgings, instructions. She sticks to those choices. Rigorously. I\u2019m just the maid. My voice doesn\u2019t count, even if I am her only daughter\u2026her only child. (She lost all eight others as fetuses, maybe by choice. I knew by the time I was four\u00a0that she sure didn\u2019t want me.)<\/p>\n
Sipping coffee, waiting for the love of my life to phone home, I cast my mind inward, wondering at a woman who, my whole life, insisted that I \u201cmove.\u201d And move I do, more than most, more than any of my contemporaries, except maybe Kathy. Three years ago, Mom moved, too. She was agile and fit. Then, due to her own choices of personal neglect, her ability to do so with ease and vigor vanished. At sixty-eight\u2014did I tell you that I was a very late baby?\u2014she became a maimed slave to a syncopated heartbeat\u2014atrial fib. Now she lays on a bed, ordered to keep her legs up, and delivers me anger seasoned with pouts and, worse, self-pity.<\/p>\n
My mother is, in her way, a prima donna\u2014very vain. Yet, she is\u2026or was\u2026generous and caring, too. To and of others. (Never me; never my dad.) She cares for \u2018her\u2019 others a lot, especially her anthropomorphized dollies\u2014thousands of dollies.<\/p>\n
I keep thinking to myself\u2014what will I do with all of those thousands of dollies, some worth ten thousand, each?<\/p>\n
I know nothing of dollies, care nothing for dollies. I find them rather horrifying\u2014porcelain, cloth, plaster, and plastic reincarnations of someone\u2019s symbolically human ideal. (Are humans ideal? Even symbolically? \u2026I wonder in doubt.) \u201cYou can tell the artist,\u201d Mother will say, her delicate, model\u2019s hands fondling a dress, a hand, a curl. She\u2019ll line them up and point to the nuances of a particular artist on dolls that cost more, each one, than Dad made in a month. (After she bought them on time, he couldn\u2019t afford the price of his heart pills.)<\/p>\n
A friend suggests that I catalog them, then sell them on E-Bay. The very idea exhausts me. The research to price them would, alone, require a year of my time\u2014time I don\u2019t have with running a business and maintaining two households\u2014never mind my writing, recording, and session work.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s Mom\u2019s piles\u2014decades\u2019 worth of magazines and old newspaper articles, boxes of clothes bought at thrift stores and sales, yards of material waiting to be run up on one of her five pricey sewing machines. There are hundreds of books that she\u2019s never read, toys still in boxes, foot lockers filled with embroideries. There\u2019s hoards of too many dishes and vases and lamps; upstairs is that old wicker couch overflowing with teddy bears\u2026.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a five bedroom house, filled to brimming with all of Mom\u2019s treasures\u2014old cradles and buggies, doll houses and miniature tea sets\u2014and all of it\u2019s covered in decades of dust. (She never cleaned house after Dad\u2019s heart began failing\u2014no reason, I guess.)<\/p>\n
That\u2019s just the inside. Outdoors, there\u2019s the piles of old garbage, the broken down fences, the rotting car, truck, and trailer, this last a haphazard minefield inside containing a vast store of treacherous gardening tools. (I\u2019d keep the gardening tools and fix up the fences.)<\/p>\n
Another train\u2019s passing, its horn dulled by the distance. My coffee is cold and so are my feet. It\u2019s time to close the laptop and get myself started on chores, but I linger out here on the patio, outside in the cold and the snow.<\/p>\n
My cell phone rings. I touch the headpiece I wear to hear hubs in my ear, his grumbling voice a relieving welcome.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s headed for Canada, a load full of giant, cumbersome coils. He asks after me, then requests some safe truck routes through cities in lower BC.<\/p>\n
I oblige, \u2018Googling\u2019 the easiest routes. Then, to his question, assure him that, yes, the roof man will be here today to clear barn roofs of snow load.<\/p>\n
Did I snowblow the driveway?<\/p>\n
No, but I will.<\/p>\n
Best do it before the temperature plunges to zero.<\/p>\n
I know.<\/p>\n
Did the dog\u2019s blood work come back?<\/p>\n
Not yet. It\u2019s expected today.<\/p>\n
I love you.<\/p>\n
I love you, too.<\/p>\n
Gotta go.<\/p>\n
Bye.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
In the dark of the morning, I sit in the cold, listening to emptiness. It\u2019s 4:00 AM and time to get started on morning.<\/p>\n
~ ~ ~<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So you all know Mom died mid-October and, yes, I’ve been way under the radar when it comes to both the real world and the Internet. Why doesn’t have as much to do with grief, though there’s that, as much as it does shock and anger. Mom was not expected to die. Nobody, even the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2167,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2166"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3052,"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2166\/revisions\/3052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dlkeur.com\/dlkeur-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}