Peaceable Man Files #56: A Mother Neither Here Nor There

Rachael and I with Mom in the turtle garden during a recent visit.

Random musings on my vagabond existence in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania and wherever else life takes me.

According to ancient Celtic lore, heaven and earth are just a few feet apart, and there are certain sacred places in the world where the distance between the divine and earthly realms shrinks even further.

The Celts called these points “thin places.” We enter a thin place whenever we feel the boundaries between heaven and earth dissolve. The veil lifts, and we step over a threshold into a world that is neither here nor there but somewhere in between. It can happen when in prayer or meditation, or when we visit a place of profound physical beauty.

My 92-year-old mother dwells in such a thin place now. As she is wheelchair-bound and needs help with everything these days, we recently moved her into an advanced care facility where she can get 24-hour care.

In Mom’s mind, though, she is not at a facility. She is somewhere else, in transition, waiting to go home.

I was reminded of this when I went to visit her the other afternoon. I found her in the Activities Room watching TV with the other women, half of whom were slumped on their wheelchairs, either asleep or out of it.

Mom brightened when she saw me. Despite her cognitive decline, she is still able to recognize us, which my siblings and I are grateful for.

“How did you know where to find me?” she asked.

In the thin space where Mom dwells, she travels from place to place, memory to memory, and it always surprises her when one of her children knows where she is. On any given day when we visit her, she may have just been sitting with my father, or visiting her older sister Marian, or walking at the mall with her friend Arlene—this despite the fact that all of them have been gone for years.

I told her that I asked around and people said I might be able to find her here.  

“Well, I’m glad you came,” she said. “I’ve been waiting all day for someone to get me out of here.”

I asked her where she wanted to go.

“Home!” she said.

I found myself wondering where home was to her now. Was it the old farmhouse where she lived for 56 years before she had to leave there three years ago? Was it the personal-care apartment that we just moved her out of? Was it heaven?

I had no idea. I still had my feet firmly in the earthly realm while she was slipping away to somewhere else where I could not go.  

“This is your home, Mom,” I reminded her.

It was the wrong thing to say. Her cheek muscles tightened. “This is not my home. Take me home!”

My siblings and I have found that distraction works well with Mom when she gets worked up. Give her a change of scenery and she will forget whatever is troubling her. Sometimes we will take her down to the outdoor courtyard with the koi pond and turtle garden where she can sit for a while and get some fresh air.

It was raining on this day, however, and so I wheeled Mom into her room, figuring we could watch TV for a while until it was time for dinner. I flipped through the channels and came to ABC Action News.

Action News has been part of our family for fifty years. Every evening in our old homestead, our TV would be tuned to Channel 6 to watch Jim Gardner and the rest of the evening news gang. While the faces have changed over the years, Mom is still familiar with the program, and as soon as I turned it on, she settled down.

For the next half an hour, she said nothing more about wanting to be taken home. She was happy to sit there with me and watch the news. It struck me that perhaps home to Mom is just being around loved ones while doing things that are familiar to her, like watching the news.

For all I knew, maybe in her mind she was sitting on the couch in the old living room working on her knitting while Action News played in the background. I doubted that she was absorbing anything of what she was seeing, but what did it matter if she was content?

I asked Mom if she was getting hungry. She nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I need to get dinner started.”

Mom hasn’t cooked a meal in years. But in her mind, it is a duty she always needs to be thinking about. After all, she made dinners for a family of eight every day for more than six decades.

“What are you making for dinner?” I asked her, going along with it.

She went quiet for a moment as she puzzled on that.

“I’m making chicken and potatoes,” she replied. “And vegetables.”

“Maybe we could have some tomatoes from the garden,” I suggested.

“If there are any that are ripe,” she said. “We need to check.”

We sat for a while longer until the nurse came to wheel her into the dining room. Her dinner was brought out: a big mound of chicken parmesan, pureed into mush, along with mashed potatoes and applesauce.

As Mom has lost most of her teeth, she can’t eat normal food anymore and everything must be pureed, nurse’s orders. Yuck.

I told her I needed to go, and I leaned down to give her a kiss.

“Drive carefully!” she said.

Once a mother, always a mother.

As I walked away, I looked back to see her working on her plate of mush, and I wondered what she was thinking about, where she thought she was. Wherever she was, she looked content, and that was all I could ask for.