I step into my skis and glide through the frozen apple orchards of my youth. Through farm animals and the smell of musty sleeping bags, through the innocence of ice skates and metal runner sleds, and then on through long summer days as a skinny no hips loose pants two braids 11 year old. I ski through the confused and anxious years of wanting attention from boys but being terrified by it. Over snowmobile trails and through beaver meadows, I keep skiing as I revisit the day I got my period. The shock of seeing rusty stains on my underwear and the quiet confusing three days that passed before I mustered the courage to tell my mom. And still not tight enough pants to be noticed by the boys.
Breadloaf mountain’s spine presses into the morning blue. I ski past last night’s meandering fox tracks and the unwavering laser-focused path of a pre-dawn coyote. My mother is dying. This is a fact delivered by science. I believe it. I understand it. But I don’t yet see it.
My whole life, ever since I can remember, my mother has been a mystery to me. Now, staring into the face of her end, I remember with a jolt something I read once about how people will show you who they are if you only will listen, if you only will really see them. Has she been showing me all along? I only saw the parts she was willing to reveal, but I always wanted more. Our relationship has been complicated. There is little time left and the things I want to know are not for this daughter to know about this mother in this lifetime. Acceptance of this has been hard won.
These are the things that come in the dark night when my mother is dying for real this time — not like the other times when we pulled her from the bottom of her bottle. This time her organs are riddled with cancer and there are no more second chances left and we don’t quite know what to do or how to balance the doing with the letting happen.
I am sitting on the bed, mom to my left, and the sunny window to my right. I’m reading some of my journal entries to her as the wind sends sharp blasts across the snow, creating wispy strands that float from east to west. The smell of death is in the room, even with the window slightly cracked to the bitter cold fresh air. I want you to know me, I tell her. I’m reading you these things because I want you to know who I am and because I always wanted to know such things about you.
The sun streams through the window and I find myself settled in the quiet confusion of weepy and broken gratitude that I can be here with her, even if only to sit uselessly by her side. She seems so peaceful, and the space is bright and comforting. Mary Oliver says, “it’s not the weight you carry but how you carry it — books, bricks, grief — it’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it, when you cannot and would not put it down.” Sometimes the load feels impossibly heavy, other times, we forget we are carrying anything at all.
Nat the Therapy Dog is curled up next to mom’s left shoulder, his head tucked into the crook of her neck just a few inches from her face. I hold my mom’s tiny bony hand and watch her face. All the complications of our relationship no longer important, I feel only empathy now. Just compassion for her struggles and acceptance that like all of us, she is a person with flaws who did her best. I watch her breathe and think Someday this will be each of us.
I step outside and into 4 inches of cold blowing snow. The drive home is slow going — dark, snow covered, and wind-blown. It takes a long time, which is okay. As I approach the house, a barred owl leaves its perch near the front deck and flies across the garden into the woods, weightless, showing my mother the way.