Okay, I promise. This is the last blog for a while about my mother. I left her this morning, coming to her bedside to kiss her goodbye. I touched her forehead, as this poem suggests, and smiled all that I could so that she would feel less alone. But I wonder about my own loneliness, now 600 miles from her? In the dance of daughters and mothers, who abandoned whom first, and ever again and again?
My mother in her dementa is strange, mute, difficult and sometimes unmanageble, but in this sleepless night I see her as a beautiful child of this world. I recall her good years before she began to slip away how we went for walks, upon walks. I would help her put on her coat, wishing her to feel the warmth in my heart. In those days I never, ever considered that I would lose her in this way.
I suppose she isn't lost really, for she is my own dear love sorrow. Ever with me, achingly so.
I think I'll go for a walk with her as soon as the morning light lessens this current darkness. Who knows then what amazing things may happen - a growth in love sorrow for tomorrow and for all beings.
Who or what is your love sorrow?
I don't have words to write in coherent response to these last several posts, but I want you to know I'm reading, and they are meeting me with abundance, both MO's lines, and your musings. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you are with me, and the others too who read with us upon each day's rising.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading my way through this site years later and relating to the posts about your mother. Mine had vascular dementia and lived for many years, the woman she had been gradually slipping away. But not everything--she always brightened when I came to visit.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason the actual poem isn't on the page for me. I've refreshed a couple of times. I found it elsewhere and am copying it here as a backup.
Love Sorrow
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.
Mary Oliver, from Red Bird