MILKSHAKE DAY
A month ago Serene and I traveled to Augusta to pack up our lake house. It’s a long story, but it was time to sever the ties to that property.
Afterward, Serene traveled home while I headed to Florida to visit my parents, but more specifically, to see my mother. She has been in a steady decline since being diagnosed with an awful condition that atrophies her brain taking parts of her away, little by little. The last time I saw her, she was having trouble putting thoughts together but she was upright, in an easy chair, watching television and humming along to old songs. This limited, but happy existence seemed okay for me, the oldest of her four children.
Turns out, I wasn’t fully prepared for what I would find when I accompanied my father to the facility where she is being cared for now.
My mother, the woman who was so beautiful that my friends would say, “Your mother is sooooooo beautiful”, and was so funny and sweet and alive… was a withered shadow of the person who was my constant comfort and protector against all bad things.
She was lying in a stark bed, her hands clenched in claws hovering above an oddly patterned fleece blanket, silently waiting for anything to happen, in a room decorated with another person’s idea of how it should look.
It took all the strength I had in me to keep from bursting into tears.
My father tapped her on the nose and said, “Guess who’s here.”
Her eyes, clenched shut against all outside influence, opened into the blank stare that her new blindness dictates. She searched for an answer. I leaned forward and whispered in her ear.
“Hello mother.”
The formal “Mother” was a sobriquet that began as a joke, eons ago, and has stuck for 20 years.
“Raaayyyyyy!” was her slurred but gleeful response.
What followed was a funny exchange where I tried to make her laugh and she obliged by doing just that. It was painful to force the conversation, filling all the enormous voids in that beige room. Painful and sad beyond belief.
My father told her that we were going to go out and get her a milkshake, and that we’d be right back. I would learn later that a McDonald’s milkshake was her weekly treat. We rolled out of the pallor of the institutional surrounds and returned 30 minutes later.My father adjusted the flexible straw in the takeaway cup and scooted up to the side of the bed. On a side table there was a photographic portrait of my mother with my sister from maybe 15 years ago. On another, there was a CD player my father bought so that she would have music to listen to. I found it disconcerting that he had chosen country, his favorite kind of music, instead of the styles that she loved. My most vivid memories of my mother at her most vital are of her dancing, with complete abandon, to Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music” or any Elvis hit.
She leaned forward, off her stack of pillows, to take the straw in her mouth, her eyes still tightly closed with her brow knitted into a knot that would otherwise indicate excruciating pain. A long pull on the straw made her eyebrows relax and traces of a smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.
As if summoned by some fucked up writer of way too much, the cheap CD player spilled an Ann Murray song into the moment and kicked me in the heart.
“Could I have this dance, for the rest of my life…”
Later, back at my parents’ house, I went through some photo albums and found pictures of my mom, including the one you see here, around the time that my father went to Vietnam. It confirmed that my memories hadn’t been romanticized, she really was such a beauty.
I so miss who she was, but I’m glad that she’s still here and seems to be comfortable and relatively happy.
At least on milkshake day.
Happy Mother’s Day, mom.