Ocean and Old Trees
Digging in the past is hard work. Ask any archeologist. You can find broken things and dead men’s bones. Or, even worse, break what is priceless and too fragile to be unearthed. Memories can pierce the heart like shards of a broken urn. Or, what we find can be mundane and pointless; fragments that, put together, frustrate and bewilder. But digging is necessary, vital like sunlight or marrow. It enlightens. It gives life.
But where do we begin? And whom do we slay as we lay bare the vestiges of the past? Beware of desecration. If you are looking for the scandalous, you will not find it here. What is holy will remain untouched. So, what then, is left to say? I begin with my first fear. The death of my mother.
Her love for me was a fortress, the barricade that deflected the perplexities that can inhabit any childhood. The timbre of her presence permeated my days like sweet honey in a comb. She and I were one. There was no clear demarcation of her ending and my beginning. Mother and child. The Nativity. The essence of love. But such innocence cannot persevere. The day came that I was playing alone, and from the silver projection of our TV screen came the screams of a child who had lost her mother in a horrible accident. Terrified, I fled the room and the house and the sudden specter of death streaming from that square box. Without warning, the insidious tree of knowledge inched its tendrils around my throat and began to squeeze. I couldn’t breathe. The realization that my mother could die struck me with the fierceness of a sudden calamitous event or a clap of thunder. I was five.
Soon after this, my vigils began. They were not nightly, but they were consistent. I would creep into my mother’s room and watch the slow rhythm of her chest. Breathing is imperceptible. Especially when someone is sleeping. Sometimes I couldn’t see it, and my own breath would stop for a moment as if my life would end when hers did. Occasionally, she would awaken and f ind me standing there like a silent sentinel. It must have been disconcerting, but it was always the same. An embrace, whispered reassurances, and the quiet walk back to my room. She had lost her own mother at fourteen, and I think she instinctively knew my anguish. I don’t remember when I stopped watching. As we mature, our coping mechanisms evolve, but the fear of her death never left me; it simply hardened into a grim expectancy buried deep in my heart like the cold stone of a peach.
If we are lucky, and I was, abundance invades the vacuous spaces forged by the fear of what could be. We all have anxieties that need the balm a full life. Friends, family, work, learning, faith all bring richness to the rocky soil that undergirds our days. Without these, fear would win. I would still be watching, looking for signs of life in the dark, when, in fact, it was vibrating all around me. Gradually, life became more insistent than death, and worry caved to the new preoccupations of school and the little blonde-haired boy who chased me around the jungle gym on the first-grade playground. Perspective.
My mother lived a vibrant, long life. She died at 95, and, yes, I was there, watching. Breathing is imperceptible. I cannot tell you when it stopped. The only indication of her life slipping away was the clinical flat lining of the heart monitor beside the hospital bed. Nor can I tell you at what point in my life I became equipped for this moment. Growing up is as imperceptible as breathing. I did not have to face the agony of the untimely deprivation of my mother as that young girl did on that long-ago silver screen or as my own mother did at fourteen. She was with me on my first day of first grade and my graduation from high school. She held my hand when my young heart was broken and again on my wedding day. She was there for Christmas and birthdays and ordinary days. She was there for the birth of my daughter and eighteen years later at her graduation. That was her last trip to my home. The lessons that life teaches us are often hard won. Listen to the lesson of a Breathing Watcher. My mother will always be with me, and I, in turn, will always be with my daughter, and she will always be with her children yet unborn. The ocean and old trees, immortalized by E. A. Robinson, have nothing on us. We are as enduring and miraculous as they.