Cold, cold hand

My mother is in the hospital. Again. Every year it’s something different. This time it’s a broken ankle and a blood clot. I’ve learned a few lessons from years past.
“No morphine,” I tell the emergency room doctor who calls me as I’m driving late at night from Tallahassee, where I’ve been taking a mini-vacation, to Charlotte where I live.
The next day when I get to the hospital I tell them again: “No morphine. I know she says she’s in pain. She’s always in pain. But no morphine.”
The doctor agrees with me, but that night someone gives her morphine anyway. The next day the doctor writes that she’s allergic to morphine in her chart.
The last time she was in the hospital they loaded her up on Sister M. And she got so loopy we thought she’d had a stroke. She couldn’t complete a sentence. Thoughts were amorphous things floating like clouds far above her grasp. It lasted for weeks, months really. She tried to communicate but couldn't.
The next day I am sitting in the green chair in my mother’s hospital room and she’s methodically examining her cover sheet. She has a pen in one hand and a partially completed crossword but she is not doing the crossword puzzle. Instead she runs the edge of that sheet thru her fingers. When I ask her what she is doing, she has no idea. Finally, she drifts off.
My friend Patti says, “So many of my women friends have been taking care of their mothers longer than their mothers took care of them.”
Good God, I think. Decades.
Now my mother is sitting staring blankly out at nothing, wearing a green hospital robe, a purple DNR wrist band and a heart monitor. She has expressly stated that no rescue attempts should be made in the event she gives out. But she’s not really that sick. She’s 91. She’s in constant pain. She’s often confused, but there is nothing drastically wrong with her, nothing a few months of blood thinner and ten or so other pills a day can’t cure.
My daughter is entering her first year of college. I hope she remembers the instructions I give her on my cellphone as I sit in the parking lot of the hospital.
“Honey, if they want to give me blood thinner, if they want to give me antibiotics, if they want to give me anything, just say no. Let nature have its way. Do you hear me?”
She says that she does, but who knows what it will be like when we're there.
My mother said to me in the hospital: “When my time comes, I don’t want you to be sad. I want you to be happy for me. My life as me is effectively over.”
“I will miss you terribly,” I answer. “But I will be happy for you.”

Homage to Wendy

Wendy Bishop was a writer who died in 2003 of a tumor wrapped around her heart. My friend Dean was her husband. He lives in Alligator Point now and protects sea turtles that come to the beach to lay eggs.

Dean and I walk the beach, talking of sea turtles, guitars, old friends.
“Tell me the name of those again,” I say, pointing to tiny clams that disappear bottoms up in the brown wet sand.
“Donax,” he says.
“That’s right,” I say. “I always think it’s gonads.”

Returning to the thin arm of sand, stretched before the low beach house, Dean sits on the towel while I wade into warm water, my joy meter ticking upwards as the waves canter toward me. And I dive into the murky Gulf, thick with salt and seaweed. Far across the water, the horizon stretches in a long flat line.

“It always changes,” Dean had said. And he’s right. It used to be you had to walk miles for the water to reach your shoulders. And now I’m just twenty or so yards out and it’s plenty deep enough. And yet it’s always the same, too, I think, laying my body on the surface as waves jostle and knead and tease me like a cat with a toy mouse.
Yes, God, this is why I came, for this, for this. And a voice in my head says, this would make a nice poem. Not my voice, of course. It is Wendy whispering, not wondering why I turn up – bad penny that I am. She never scolded me when she was here, just gave me that look sometimes that said, “simmer down.”
And now she exhorts me to clutch the seaweed, the long water grass, brushing my fingers, to breathe in the pungent, ancient scent, to stop simmering now, and live life at a full boil.