The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

she wouldn't say

Yesterday was M.'s mother's birthday. I knew it when I woke up, as I have a freakish memory for things like birthdays and deathdays, but I didn't say anything about it. I was too busy with my own emotions to give much thought to his, though I was aware that the day might be a long one for him. The first birthday of hers in his lifetime when she was around to celebrate it. Last year on her birthday, we went to Montreal to visit with her in the nursing home where she was living, a dark, dilapidated old home which probably hasn't seen a renovation or paint job in forty odd years. The elevator was the kind in which you had to close the door yourself, hoping to get to the next floor in a tiny, claustrophobic cube that smelled of institutional food and old urine. M. had been dreading the visit, but it had been quite a while before that that he'd seen her, and he knew it was time. We had walked into her room, a vast room without pictures or any other personal effects, only two hospital beds and two barren dressers. She hadn't really known who we were when we walked in but was especially interested in the wee one, a spark of curiosity and delight passing over her emaciated face. She said very little, and I remember her hands looked skeletal.

This was a different woman than the one I'd met five years before. She'd been determined and strong, always dressed in a jacket and scarf, always had her hair pinned just so. She liked panini sandwiches for lunch, read voraciously, and spent hours in the antique shop in the village where she lived. To see her like that was strange for me, let alone her son. So, that day, we took her out to the gazebo on the side of the river and tried to talk to her about the weather, how she was, that sort of thing, until it became obvious that she was either not listening, or couldn't hear us at all. She watched Kitty Kat who was running up and down the ramp, smiling at her, perhaps knowing that this was her grandchild, and I could see that M. was happy with that. At one point, she looked as though she had caught a thought, and M. asked her lightly, 'Mother, what are you thinking about?'.

She looked at him with a cheeky grin and said, 'Chocolate.'

That was the last word we ever heard her speak, as she fell asleep soon after, sitting up in a wheelchair, her head filled with skipping girls and chocolate.

So, yesterday evening, when M. returned from the boat, I absent-mindedly mentioned how it would have been her ninety-first birthday, and he stopped completely. It turned out that he'd forgotten about it, and I immediately wished I hadn't said anything, apologizing for doing so. He was good about it, said that he didn't mind that I had, but later I saw the slow creep of depression come over him. It's not that he misses her, exactly. As he has often said, no matter what age you are, you feel like an orphan when your parents are gone. He can barely even stand to look at a photo of her these days, often comes close to bursting into tears when he does, because she was his mother, the only one he had, and now she's dead.

My family has never understood why M. didn't rush to her bedside when she lay dying. My mother, in particular, thinks it was a horrible thing to do, to let her die all alone. I can't say I understand what he was feeling, but I know he loved her, that he spent a great deal of time and money trying to make sure her later years were good ones, and that he just couldn't bring himself to see her in the last moments of her life. She didn't know who she was, he said, and the only person who would have been affected would have been him. Aside from all of this, she wasn't a warm woman with regard to him. She loved him in her way, but her life was always about her and he was often just the 'son', the incidental extension of herself and the man she'd once loved. He desperately wanted a close relationship with her for years, but it wasn't in her, and so eventually he gave up on it and accepted her for who she was. This included letting her live alone, and eventually, dying alone. I don't think he should be criticized for it. I think, if anything, people should stay silent about what they don't understand. Knowing how loving a man he is with me and his daughter, it seems to me that my family would do better to think about why he didn't go, rather than judging him for it.

"It's a good lesson, I think," I'd said to my mother when she dared to make a catty comment about him. "It goes to show that you need to be good to people while you're alive, or you'll be alone in the end." I meant it as a warning to her, but I don't know that it sunk in.

I think M. is sad because he always hoped for a different kind of love from his parents than what they were capable of giving. Maybe it was because they'd both lived through a war, his father living in occupied France and his mother dealing with bombs as they dropped around her house in England. Maybe life experiences make people harder than they start out, that they can't find reason in investing in sentiment when they've witnessed so much sadness. Maybe they just got to be too practical for love. I don't know, but I will say that I am intensely curious about them both, mostly because I identify with trying to control emotions. I don't believe they didn't love him. I don't believe they didn't love each other, even. I think it just got to be too difficult to let the walls down, that they could only really live by keeping their feelings close and unseen. I get that, but I hate that M. has suffered for it.

I have to say that I love that her last spoken word to M. was 'chocolate'. It let me see that the little girl was still in there, that the war, the partings, the isolation, the distances, the clumsy affection and the drama hadn't silenced her completely. I saw that in the way she watched the wee one skipping about. It was almost as though she wanted to join her.

Yesterday was not a great day for him and I emotionally, but it's done now.