Mother

She is standing on the beach, the wind blowing her hair in front of her eyes.  She is reaching up with her hand, brown splotched with age, to move it away.  Her smile reveals jowls and wrinkles and a glistening gold crown on a rear molar.

She is wearing her reading glasses, the ones with the dotted leopard frames, as if that will help her see anyone, or anything, any better than she would without them.  It is her last vacation.  The bracelet that adorns her wrist is made of huge costume pearls and her gold hoop earrings dangle back and forth in the breeze.

Her pants are rolled up.  She is a few feet into the tide. The low surf in the background reveals an ocean full of people on boogie boards among the frothy waves. She leans on her cane with one hand, her other rests poised on her hip.

I wonder what she really sees.  Her eyes have grown smaller.  Thin white skin drapes her body and there she is just like so many times before, her head tilted back unaware that anyone has captured her smile or joy, but posing for a camera just in case.   What does joy feel or look like to an octogenarian?

I see the photo wondering who took it.  That was then.  This is now.  I hear a moan in her room and rush to her side.  Out of her deep morphine-induced sleep, she sits up and murmurs, “my tummy hurts.”  This is my mother-child.  I kneel at her side.  She closes her eyes and whimpers softly, is still, and returns to deep breathing as if nothing has happened. 

I crawl up on her bed, wanting to cuddle her skeletal body as she once did for me during an illness not many years ago.  I want to comfort her.  I read aloud the twenty-third Psalm, hoping.   Then I grab a throw pillow continue to lay there, eyes closed. Through my drowsiness I hear her repeat the words I have heard so many times in recent months, “I hope I go tonight.”