Keeper of the Heart

Well, apparently, I'm posting once a month these days, if I'm lucky.  It's been a long few months, for reasons that I can't really go into here, but suffice it to say, it's more than kind of sucked. I've begun crawling out from all of it these last few weeks, and had a lovely visit to Northern Cal this weekend to visit Matt, who might be the sweetest man on earth.  He's also become somewhat of an expert in keeping me relatively sane in the middle of all of this.  It's been a good month with Ma, although some days I feel like she's shifting again, harder for her to find language and to track certain things, which I hate.  Despite all that she's still sharp enough to follow what I'm saying, to make me laugh and to recommend books along the way.

She made me lose it the other day when she told me I should read, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship which chronicles the friendship of two writers in mid-life, Caroline Knapp and Gail Caldwell.   I love Knapp's essays and the way she bonded with dogs better than people, and her memoir about her alcoholism Drinking: A Love Story, is one of the best I've ever read.  Knapp died at 42 of lung cancer; Gail Caldwell wrote the book.  Ma read about in the NYTimes, and on my way out the door last week, this was the conversation that transpired:

Ma: That book, you know, that one (she had already pointed out the review to me)....reminded me of us, the way they could talk and talk and talk.
Me: Already crying, unable to speak.
Ma : And she, this writer, she still, she still....
Me: Talks to her dead friend?
Ma: Yeah. So I want you to get it.
Me: More crying.
Ma: I didn't want to make you cry. But I wanted to remember to tell you.
Me: Still crying.

The thing is, my mother is the only person who would understand why I would want to read a memoir about death when my mother is in fact, dying.  And this is because she wants to read it too.  Somehow, for the two of us, it eases the pain and lessens the mystery when we can take in someone else's experience and/or watch them survive the thing they think they cannot.   Not everyone is comfortable living this way, and my mother has always made me feel like I don't have to apologize for this macabre fascination with suffering, because it really is (unfortunately or fortunately) truly the stuff of life. If I've learned anything this year it's that there is no way to avoid it, the suffering, no matter what you do. You can plan and organize the shit out of everyday to try and maintain the illusion that this will somehow stop the unexpected and keep you safe.  Some people spend there whole lives doing just that, polishing an illusion, and inevitably missing the glory of whatever shitstorm comes their way.  

And I guess that's what I'm trying to do here, catch the glory of the shitstorm by re-telling these little moments with Ma.  There are so many of them that there are too many to record, but I try to anyway, afraid as I am to miss or forget even one of them.  She is still so powerfully here, no matter how she struggles with certain phrases or concepts.  She is here to remind me of what we have and how lucky we are, and to remind me that all of that will still be here when she's gone. She is here to live out these days with me and fill them with meaning, and keep changing at some level the person I have been for years, even who I was a year ago. She tells me that everything that has happened these last 15 months has meaning, that nothing is an accident, every moment has its purpose and place, even if we don't understand exactly why for years, even if we never understand.

She passed Ted Kennedy in August, which I don't think can be called anything but a miracle. Sometimes she laments that it is all taking so long; not for her, but for those of us who take care of her. We, of course, despite our own impatience and frustration, wouldn't want it any other way.  I don't think she would either. And plus, as she says, she asked her guru for more time.  Whatever the outcome, there can be no doubt that we have been given that gift. 

When Ma was first sick, she was given a pretty major dose of steroids to keep the swelling in her brain down, and what this did for a few weeks last June was to make her go completely manic. At the time, she believed it was "shakti" energy, an outpouring from the universe, but now, she admits it was probably just some really good drugs. She sent us all on a lot of errands to Target for pens, for note cards and mainly for scotch tape - she really had a thing for that scotch tape - and she had a lot of ideas about what she was going to do with the rest of her life.  One idea was that she would volunteer at the hospice where she worked at a few times a week, create a meditation room there and serve as a sort of counselor for the nurses and social workers to keep them from getting burned out.  What she wanted, she said, was to keep the heart in hospice.

Let's just say there was a lot of this kind of thing going on last summer.

Of course, that plan was interrupted by paralyzation, surgery and well, this fucking brain tumor.  Yet what I realized the other day is that she is keeping love alive, the heart of life alive for everyone she comes into contact with.  We joke that she is something like an Indian Ma now, in that people come to sit with her, the house her ashram, her title "The Keeper of the Heart." They come to  meditate, laugh and get a little relief from the stresses of their own lives.  I see it in the faces of her friends who come  to visit or take care of her; they see it in me when we are all hanging out together. Put as simply as possible, it's just love, the purest and most sustained source of it I've ever been around in my life.

When Ma gets tired and can't find the right sentence to respond to those around her, I watch her struggle and get frustrated.  Sometimes, she gives up, and always apologizes when this happens. Her friend Roni came the other day, and said although she missed the long walks they'd taken together over the years, talking about cranky husbands or worrying about their children, to sit with her was just the same, no matter the issue of language.  And Roni said, "But you are right here with me, even if you can't talk.  You are right here."

And she is.  Right here, with all of us.