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Worrying in a Snowstorm

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It snowed last night and it’s floating lightly down still. I feel enveloped in beauty and solitude. I haven’t seen Mama since Friday and now it’s Wednesday. I was sick Saturday and I didn’t want to expose her on my way to Seattle for childcare on Sunday. She’s expecting me today and I have no way to let her know I’m not going to venture down the hill. We do need to get her a phone; I’m sure she feels isolated.

I go for a walk in the woods leaving virgin footprints on the trails, but for the deer and rabbit tracks. It’s a wonderland in black and white. In mid-afternoon, though, the weak sun breaks out, melting the sidewalk and steps to the carport; and, according to the forecast—which is not necessarily trustworthy, since it missed the snow event entirely—the temperature is to be above freezing for a little while. I decide to try driving down the hill just before early dinner at the Manor when Mama will be up from her nap.

Rebecca checks in to see if I have been yet. I tell her I’m going shortly. She texts again. Mama has gotten an aide to call Rebecca on her cell phone so Mama could talk to her. She’s “worried sick because no one has come,” Rebecca texts, adding an eye-roll emoji.

Skidding in the driveway, I get to the road. It is not clear, of course. It may not melt for days at the curve under the trees with the temperature in the twenties at night. I have all-wheel drive, but my car is old.  This was a bad idea. When it comes to driving in snow, I’m a worrier too.

When I reach Mama’s room, she practically falls into my arms.

“I was so worried!” she exclaims.

“That’s why I was staying home,” I say. “I thought you would understand I didn’t want to come down the hill in the snow.”

“Have you been home?” she asks.

“All day,” I say. “But you told Rebecca you were ‘worried sick’ so I decided I would venture out. And I wanted to see you,” I add belatedly.

“But I thought you were coming back from Seattle today.”

“I came back yesterday, Tuesday, like always. I left early, in fact, because of the forecast.”

“I didn’t know that,” she sighs.

Rebecca tells me later she told Mama yesterday I would be home last night, but Mama forgot. When Rebecca told her I was “on my way,” she thought she meant from Seattle, so she hadn’t stopped frantically worrying even then.

And she had thought Rebecca was going to the dentist at eight o’clock, twenty minutes away on two-lane roads; an appointment Rebecca canceled. “I had visions of you both stranded on the road, sitting in your cars freezing!” she says.

“You only have to remember one thing,” I say, knowing she won’t: “neither of us will drive out of town in snow and ice.”

I can’t keep her from worrying, she’s been doing it her whole life. But dementia exacerbates it and I will drive myself crazy trying not to be the cause of it. I don’t know if a phone in her room will help or not. I can think of a dozen pitfalls: she won’t hear it ring, she won’t take a nap for fear of missing a call, she’ll fall hurrying to get to it, she won’t remember how to use it, she won’t be able to hear, she’ll misunderstand, she won’t remember, . . . I don’t know what to do. I guess what we’ve always done, my father too: let her worry. It makes my stomach hurt.

The Book of Regrets: A Braided Story

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On this date, seventy-nine years ago, my parents were married.
In the parlor of the biggest church in Dallas.
It was the only available venue my father could find on short notice.
It was very short notice.

I don’t dwell in the Land of Regret. My mother did, only she called it guilt. “I don’t want you to feel guilty for years like I have,” she would say, referring to not understanding that her grumpy mother’s complaints and inability to be appreciative were because she was old. “I don’t do guilt,” I said, wondering why she didn’t put her efforts into acting less like her mother rather than in shaming me.

Found in a box. Notes on her mother’s transgressions, written perhaps before a doctor or therapist appointment, or for a letter to her far away brothers.

Guilt: Doing something that violates one’s moral compass.

But she didn’t really mean guilt. She meant regret, wishing in the look back she had done it differently. Semantics. But what I meant was that I don’t dwell on it like she did.

Stellajoe had migrated from Tennessee to Spokane, Washington to work on an Army Air Force base.
Neither her job nor her boarding house accommodations were ideal.
George, a newly-trained wartime meteorologist, was in Dallas. 

November 12, 1943. “First I’ll come right out and admit to you that I made a mistake. I should have married you. The fundamental reasons for not getting married haven’t changed. But other things that I foresee have cropped up to at least balance them. I guess I’ve told you enough about Hensley Field for you to realize that we aren’t far from a peacetime organization. And I guess it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that I might hit just such a place overseas, even. If such a thing should come about, I wouldn’t be haunted by the fear that I’d come back to a young wife crippled or disabled. . . . I know your belief that if you love me you’ll never love anyone else. Frankly I don’t believe it.
Time is a great healer and over a period of years I know you could forget me.” 

Regret is typically based on the degree to which your ideal self (what you believe you COULD BE) diverges from your actual self (the person you are in reality).

I knew when angry words left my mouth, I would later wish I had been more compassionate. I also know if I had it to do over, I probably couldn’t have been more understanding in the moment. The words flew out of mouth in frustration, or bubbled up from my own hurt at the way she seemed not to appreciate my efforts; they weren’t from a lack of compassion. Or maybe the angry words were a cover for my own heart-deep pain at watching her decline. What I regret is that I didn’t apologize more. But I would have been apologizing constantly.

“I know I’ve bungled this business very, very badly, and it would be no more than I deserve if you didn’t want  to get married now. I can’t offer you any assurance of a week together even.
But I’m ready to get married.”

It’s been four and a half years since there has been a chance for a do-over or an apology. I am doing exactly what she thought she could spare me: regretting. I knew I would have regrets, I knew it then; but caregiving perfection was not in my grasp any more than it had once been in hers. So what to do with the expanding list? I am discovering that naming them, apologizing in absentia, forgiving myself, forgiving her, makes the vow I did make—not to dwell there—a promise to myself, and to her, that I can keep.

The long, rambling letter was slow to arrive.
On November 16, he sent a telegram, saying he was going to call.
The connection was bad. He proposed on the phone.
She must have told him she would write her response.

As I name them, though, I find a second distinction: not only guilt vs. regret, but regret vs. grief. It’s an emotion I’m still unpacking. Perhaps after the Book of Regrets is written—or at least begun—I will understand it better. I have a feeling grief is not as easily dismissed. Grief is a thing that, over time, we learn to embrace as part of our Self.

The Book of Regrets

❧ Soon after my arrival at my new old home, my mother told me she had asked the yard person to clear out the salal, Oregon grape, and blackberry vines at the landing of the steps to my father’s workshop to create an opening to duck under the vine maples to reach a small wild dogwood tree. She thought I might want to sit there. “Why would I want to do that?” I asked, my voice dripping with dismissal. It was long later that it dawned on me that she knew I was missing my home in North Carolina, and the brick patio I had made under a huge dogwood tree. She was doing what she could to help me find home again.

It’s been ten years as I write this, and the grief of my lack of understanding wallops me anew. I wanted to apologize, to tell her I finally recognized what she was trying to do. But I didn’t do it. In the last days of her life, I remembered again. I knew she was going to be gone and I knew would regret not saying I was sorry, and still the words wouldn’t leave my mouth.

I talk to her now at Staebler Point, in the city’s natural area she so loved. I speak the words into the breeze and hope she knows.

November 19. He sent another telegram saying he hadn’t gotten her letter
and would call when it arrived.

❧ I regret I couldn’t keep her in her beloved home, but the grief doesn’t reach so deeply. I couldn’t, I know that. What I regret is that she didn’t leave the earth before the move became necessary. And I had no control over that. She lived in the house longer because I was here. She lingered in this life longer because I was here. She didn’t die in a hospital, she was in her own bed, I was in the room. I try to let that be enough.

November 22. Another telegram saying he couldn’t get a call through, (after trying for five hours);
but yes, he wanted her to come, the quicker the better. 

❧ I wish I hadn’t asked her tell me how it felt to be old. It was not her responsibility to satisfy my curiosity. I’m glad I didn’t push. It wasn’t really what I was asking anyway. I was asking her for the first time in her life to be in touch with her inner self. I was asking her to share her Self with me. So I could share my Self.

November 23. He writes another letter and is waiting again for her reply, by mail or telegram,
hoping he wasn’t putting her on the spot.
He was sorry he wasn’t clear in the previous letter that he was definite about her coming.
“Maybe I did have too many ‘ifs’ in it.” But he needed for her to decide for herself,
knowing she might arrive and find him gone, deployed.
With no way to let her know. 

❧ A memory: She drove me back to college after some holiday and walked with me from visitor parking to my dorm. She held my hand as we walked. I was uncomfortable and embarrassed. But I didn’t pull away. One thing I saved myself from regretting much later.

November 27. She got her blood test, a wedding dress, and a train ticket. George writes his parents that Stellajoe was leaving Spokane that night, Saturday, and expected to arrive in Dallas at 8am Monday morning, November 29, after some thirty-six hours sitting up on the train. “Probably we’ll get married Tuesday afternoon.”

❧ We gave her Alexa for her last Christmas. She loved Alexa, and astonished us by being able to summon her. Mostly she asked Alexa to tell her jokes. Alexa kept her company, a voice in the silence. I regret not learning to program her to do more than tell bad jokes.

They “tied the knot” at 6pm, November 30, 1943.
With, in spite of rationing, a handful of rice for the four attendants and guests to throw. 

❧ After she died, and I was going through boxes of her notes and partially used journals and unsent letters, I found one in which she wrote her longing to have a different relationship with me. I didn’t know. We never said the words. We couldn’t let each other in. That is what I most regret. And the well is deep. And maybe it was always too late to pull up that bucket, neither of us were raised to bare our souls. I regret something that could not have been different.

Six weeks later, George deployed. He returned April 25, 1946. 

“I thought I’d come back to give my mother another chance.
I’m starting to think it was so she could give me one.”

JODI PICOULT

❧ I wish I’d taken better advantage of this second chance. And I was too tired just trying to get through the days. But maybe just having a second chance was enough, maybe it was everything. Someone said to me had I only stayed the year I expected, I would not have gained what I eventually found.

She told me, years later, he insisted she use birth control, which she didn’t believe in.
“He was afraid he wouldn’t make it back home from Europe
and didn’t want to leave me with a child to raise alone.
If he didn’t come back, I wanted a child.
To keep a piece of him.”

I am one of those pieces. I wasn’t perfect. But I was enough.

 

Shopping: A Special Place in Heaven

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October 2014

I hate to shop. Mama loves to shop. She’s a 98-year-old clothes horse. She bought “well-made” clothes from places like Frederick & Nelson (Seattle’s now defunct subsidiary of Chicago’s Marshall Field’s, also gone). F&N was Frango Mints, the basement Paul Bunyon Room with hamburgers and ice cream sodas, and the animated windows at Christmas of my childhood. It was the top floor Tearoom with white tablecloths where I met my mother for lunch when I was in college. It was also the home of the well-made if not faddish clothes she bought for me and my sisters on our annual school shopping trip to Seattle.

“They just don’t make clothes like they used to. They don’t last,” she told me the other day, for the 4 millionth time. “No one cares if they last 40 years,” I’d said. Mama keeps her clothes—almost every purchase she ever made—in three large closets, three dressers, a cedar chest, and plastic boxes under the bed. Her closet shelf holds dress shoes in their original boxes, relics of the days she wore anything other than sturdy-soled Merrill’s black or brown walking shoes. The rod is filled with dresses, jackets, vests, and fancy blouses she hasn’t worn in a decade or more. In the guest room, even older ones are in plastic garment bags.

She’s been on the hunt this fall for shoes, a warm jacket, and a sweater to replace the Icelandic knit that fell apart winter before last. She brings her purchases home, then takes some or all of them back. It’s a familiar pattern, dating back to my childhood. Michelle took her jacket shopping last week, putting several on hold, then Mama dragged me to the store to see what I thought. She tried on three styles, three sizes of each, with much discussion of the various colors and hats she owns that might go with each. She bought one. She returned it two days later. It wasn’t warm enough.

She finally decided on a pair of shoes—of the six pairs she brought home two weeks ago. When we go for a walk at the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge, she doesn’t wear her new shoes. Apparently the old ones are good enough. I don’t ask why she got new ones, she can’t answer why questions.

After the walk, we go to REI to look at jackets. It needs to be water resistant, although she no longer walks in the rain. It needs to be big enough to wear over two sweaters, but then it’s too big if she doesn’t need two sweaters, and the sleeves on a jacket that large are too long, which seems to outrage her. She got a down jacket I am sure is warm with modern materials, but because it’s not weighty, I know I will be returning it.

Today Michelle takes her to the outlet mall to look at sweaters. She comes home with one, along with a pair of wool pants. If they aren’t wool, they aren’t well-made. She refuses to have pants custom made because she doesn’t want to pay for it, but every year she drags Rebecca (who has warned me against engaging) in the search and failure to find a pair of pants that fit her specifications, including nothing tight around her abdomen, so she buys them so big they droop around her hips.

“It’s not what I was looking for,” she says of the sweater. “It isn’t warm, and it doesn’t close in the front, except for two hooks.”

“Why did you get it then?” I ask, stupidly, knowing she can’t answer why questions.

“I thought it would look dressy with black pants,” she says.

“It would,” I agree. I should not have asked if she needs another something dressy to wear places she doesn’t go. Of course I do anyway.

“I wonder if I have a hat that matches?” she says, ignoring my question.

“It’s blue and black. You have a blue and black wool hat,” I say.

“But is it the right blue,” she says, more of a statement than a question. “Is it a summer sweater, or a winter one?”

“It’s winter colors and summer weight,” I say, trying to answer her questions now without the commentary in my head, pretending I am a witness in a trial, which it feels like.

The next day I’m at lunch with a friend when Mama calls to tell me about more sweaters and pants she and Michelle found that morning. She asks if I could take her back to the Pendleton store to look at another sweater she hadn’t gotten. Two days in a row? I groan soundlessly. “Yes,” I say, brightly.

“I don’t know if I look good in stripes,” she says when she tries it on for me.

“It looks nice on you,” I say, “but what do you want it for? This is more like a jacket and I thought you wanted something warm and cozy for in the house.”

“That’s right,” she says, remembering her mission.

She tries on a burgundy cardigan and the sales woman points out the mirror. “I can’t see it,” Mama tells her.

“Well, how does it feel?” I ask.

“I never liked red,” she says.

“What matters is how it feels,” I say. She takes it off.

I feel amazingly patient. She likes to shop. She likes to buy stuff she used to need. I will get my reward: there will be no shopping in my heaven.

I find a wool cardigan she hadn’t been shown this morning. Zippered. Pockets. Even has an Icelandic-type design like the worn out one. “It’s perfect,” I tell her. She decides to get it. As the sales woman puts it in the bag, Mama says, “I can return it, can’t I?”

From now on, Rebecca—cut from the same cloth—is on shopping detail.

________

You can listen to me read this here!