My mom forgets that she lives in China.
“I live in Michigan.” she tells me during our Skype chats, the South China Sea almost visible from the window behind her.
I search her face for the woman I use to know. Her eyes are sometimes harried, frenzied by imagined perils. More often, they are lost, wandering as if she were blind. Looking for something familiar. Never finding it. The smiling eyes that once lit her face are gone.
A mere decade ago, Mom was traveling the world, sharing her stories through photos I posted on my refrigerator. At night, as we pored over her travel photos, she kept one arm around my waist while the other dropped to sneak her last bit of cinnamon toast to my retriever, the jingle of the dog’s collar a giveaway of their unspoken arrangement. As she spoke, her eyes shone blue and bright. In those eyes I saw the woman I knew, the woman who loved me like no other.
“Who knew I’d end up traveling around the world like this?” she said back then.
Who, indeed?
In the fifties, my mom was housebound in Michigan, busy with her two children, husband, house and garden. In the sixties, by way of a surprise pregnancy, I joined the family. Dad’s job required travel and my older sister and brother were busy with their near-adult lives, so my childhood revolved around Mom. A regular weekend outing was to local nurseries.
“Hello, Betty!” nurserymen called to her over trays of plants. “Wait until you see the plants we got in this week.”
My mom kept a spring in her step as we traipsed among the rows of greenery, scouting for unusual flowers to edge our yard, vegetable plants to fill our garden. I was her proud companion as she held botany conversations with the nursery staff. She identified the tiniest plant by running the leaves through her fingers or inhaling close to its stem.
In the chillier months, Mom and I stayed kiln-side, transforming bisqueware into end-table art. She kept an ample supply of an antiquing glaze to camouflage my less than perfect painting.
“I like the antique look of your pieces,” Mom told me, the soft warmth of her arm resting on my waist. “I think that style is very popular now.”
My ceramic creations from those years, round-faced girls with bunnies, sleepy boys with dogs, and more, still adorned her living room the last time I visited her Michigan home.
On school days, we reconnected over a satiating casserole dinner. Afterward, we cleared our plates and settled in the den where Mom hummed at her sewing machine and I read Nancy Drew mysteries.
When the light over her sewing machine clicked off, I gathered up one of her crocheted afghans. The scent of warm cinnamon toast trailed Mom from the kitchen as she sat down beside me on the sofa. We snuggled beneath the orange and brown throw as laughter spilled from The Carol Burnett Show, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, and others. Mom’s loud, long laugh at every one of Tim Conway’s pratfalls made me laugh more. When my friends complained about their moms, I knew the comfort and warmth I felt on those nights was unique to Mom and me.
By the time I was ten, she no longer held me to a set bedtime. Some nights, when the blue of evening sank into the black of night, we stayed on the sofa, watching The Tonight Show. Rarely did either of us tire or retire early, preferring each other’s company to the solitude of sleep.
When she said I kept her young, I felt magical.
Below Mom’s photos on my refrigerator is a photo of my kids’ golden retriever, Lucy. Lucy joined our family when Faith and Austin were seven and eight. It was a decade of ballet and basketball, Christmas cards and carnivals, gardens and graduations. Lucy and I bore witness to it together, her tail wagging, celebrating, as I did, the chaos that filled our home. Depending on the season, I could find her flying past Faith on a snowy hill or toppling Austin on a muddy one. A retriever that never retrieved, Lucy was an adventurer who was equally adept at clearing our backyard of cats as she was at clearing my kitchen counter of cookies.
Like my mom and me, Lucy was a night owl. While my family slept, and I was busy working at my desk, Lucy would drop a toy on my lap, prompting me to pause and reflect with her about our day.
With my nose pressed to hers, I stroked her silken ears and said, “Can you believe everything we did today? The kids are growing up so fast.”
Her collar jingled with the swishing of her tail and she settled at my feet.
Five years after my departure for college emptied Mom’s nest, my entrepreneurial brother invited her to travel with him to his businesses around the world. Mom eyed his invitation like a dangled carrot, an opportunity to spend time with one of her kids, and agreed. She soon became an international traveler, taking two-week jaunts with my brother a few times every year. On her returns to the states, before flying back to her home in Michigan, Mom always stopped in California, where I had started my family.
All 4’ 10” of Mom arrived on my doorstep, brimming with photos of her travels. One arm hugged my waist and the other swept the air as she animated stories about her adventures.
“You wouldn’t believe…” began her stories about Ukrainian catacombs, St Peter’s Square and more.
When we settled at my kitchen table, I felt the familiar glow of my childhood as Mom rested one elbow on the table, chin cupped in her hand, sipping a perpetual cup of coffee. A bite of cinnamon toast reminded her of the patisseries in Hanoi and she recounted that boat ride to Vietnam.
“The weather during our boat ride was awful.” She swayed widely back and forth in her chair. “But, oh, the layers of those pastries,” smacking her lips, “were worth it.” I smiled, pretending not to notice, as Mom snuck Lucy her last bit of toast.
Long after my husband and kids went to bed, I sat there still, savoring the look on Mom’s face as she described her travels. The adventures themselves paled beside the brightness that they brought to her eyes as she relived them. Her tales were so grand that had my dad─who sometimes begrudgingly accompanied her─and my brother not backed up these stories, I may have questioned their validity. One of her favorite stories and my favorite photos was of her sitting beside a playful panda. The panda grabbed its toes as Mom laughed.
“I can’t believe they plopped the panda down right beside me,” she said one night on the sofa.
Wrapped in her flannel nightgown, she leaned into me and relived that day as Lucy nibbled the crumbs from her slippers.
After my own kids left for college, when I wept late into the nights missing them, Lucy was the sweet girl who sat up with me. She listened to me with earnest eyes as I shared my summer plans for the kids’ return.
“In June, we’ll have the cake eating contest and our beach trips. In July, we’ll go blueberry picking and watch the fireworks. And there’s the play that we always see in August.” Lucy’s eyes traced my face as I fawned over the summer activities that had become long-standing family traditions.
Austin broke the news first, that the job he secured would keep him at school for the summer. On a visit home in the spring, Faith told me about a summer program that she’d been accepted into.
“Mom, it’s exactly what I want to study. Is it okay if I don’t come home this summer?”
My heart didn’t break for only that summer, but for what I knew marked the end of our family summers. I remembered being the daughter who left my mom two thousand miles behind for college. Mom had validated, not vanquished, my dreams.
“Of course, Faith. Take it.” I gave her a congratulatory hug. Lucy’s collar chimed as she cocked her head at my feigned enthusiasm.
Later that night, Lucy warmed my feet as I long-distance called my mom to tell her about the kids’ summer commitments.
Trying to console me, Mom joked, “We both should have raised dull, insecure children who were too afraid to leave us.”
During Mom’s California visits, we stayed up late talking and working on shared projects, while Lucy jingled between us. Once, as we sewed red dragon scales onto Austin’s Halloween costume, I turned the subject to her mother, a woman who died when I was young. I was trying to put together the pieces that formed my mom.
“I bet you and Grandma used to have a lot of fun sewing together,” I said
Her long pause surprised me.
“My mom never wanted to spend time with me.”
“What?” I long idolized a version of my grandma that supported my belief that good moms begat good moms.
“Elaine was her smart daughter and Margaret was the pretty one.” Mom didn’t look up from the fabric. She tilted her head. “My mother wasn’t very nice to me. In front of my friends, she laughed at me for being too skinny, then privately she scolded me for being too fat. She told everyone that I was wasting my time with nursing school, that I wasn’t smart enough. She embarrassed me into dropping out before classes even started.”
She glanced up at me for a quick moment. “I never spent time like this with my mother.”
Lucy lifted her head to meet my wide eyes. I pictured the sixty-year-old nurse’s cape tucked in Mom’s hope chest, remembering how it still looked new. I never asked about my grandmother again.
After my dad died, Mom streamlined her travels. She spent six months of the year living abroad with my brother, six months at her Michigan home near my sister, and continued to visit us regularly in California. In Michigan, she tended her garden and checked her roof for leaks. In southeast China, she pantomimed with the non-English speaking patrons at my brother’s cafes and even helped restore a cafe after it (and she!) weathered a typhoon.
Mom’s visits with me in California reflected the days of my youth. We still traipsed through nurseries, but also explored new wineries and old bookstores. We toured every chocolate-related establishment we could find. We attended author readings and formed our own mini book club for cozy late-night sofa discussions. A reader of numerous daily newspapers, she held her own in conversations about Obamacare and same-sex marriages. She taught my daughter to sew and my son to shoot a bow and arrow. She lauded even their smallest accomplishments and lavished them with gifts, each one unique to their personalities: sparkling thrift store jewelry for Faith, specialty chocolate chip cookies for Austin. Anchored by her religion and holding tight to her memory, she speed-walked around our neighborhood, eliciting admiring comments from my friends.
During one of her visits, I returned home late from a stressful day. I found my family asleep but Mom, true to her night owl form, waiting for me on the sofa, Lucy curled atop her feet. When I walked in, she greeted me with a smile.
“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing up?”
Just making sure that you got home okay. Come here.” She patted the sofa. “Tell me about your day.”
I sat beside her on the sofa, rested my head on her shoulder, and spilled out my day.
Mom wrapped me in an afghan hug. My stress dissolved into the night.
Mom worked to keep up when our activities began to be beyond her capabilities. One drive to a new winery took longer than expected and she hobbled to get out of the car once we stopped.
“Don’t slow down for me,” she said when I came back to help her.
Our conversation was usually lively while wine tasting, but that day she seemed drowsy after the first sip. The view of a nearby flower field brought her back to life.
“I think those are marigolds,” she said, squinting and pointing a gnarled finger. I nodded, looking at the zinnias.
When I left our table to refresh our glasses, I returned to find her nodding off.
“Hey, Mom. Don’t fall asleep on me now,” I joked, but as her head continued to dip, I knew it was time to leave.
I went to the cashier to pay and told Mom I’d meet her at our car. I wasn’t alarmed when I got to the car and she wasn’t there since flowers surrounded the small parking lot. I waited in the car while I imagined her exploring and identifying plants. When too many minutes passed, I went to look for her. We both laughed when I found her sitting in a stranger’s car, but it was then that I realized how much she was faltering.
She was embarrassed and appreciative when I sat with her at our kitchen table late one night, holding her hands steady to paint her nails with her favorite pink polish, a feat her eyes and hands could no longer coordinate.
“Someday I’m not going to be able to get around like I do now,” she said.” I don’t want that to worry you when it happens.”
She tried to look into my eyes as she said this, but I shrugged it off.
“It’ll never happen,” I lied.
In Mom’s eighty-eighth year, as my husband and I made the long drive home from our daughter’s college, my brother called my cell. Mom had suffered a mild stroke while they were dining in Sanya, China. She was going to be fine, my brother assured me, so I was confident in her recovery. He sought out the best hospitals and specialists and kept her with him until she recovered physically
Though he warned me, I was not prepared for the woman who arrived at my house six months later.
Her body had recovered. Her mind had not. She was a mix of anger and anxiety. She ranted in circular conversations, lost in worry about her money, her house, her siblings, her children. She wouldn’t eat. Reading a book was now beyond her; she couldn’t focus long enough to read the shortest newspaper article. Her religion and memory faded. From day to day she couldn’t remember what town she was in, what month it was, my husband’s name.
“Mom, look.” I said, pointing to our television playing an old Carol Burnett rerun. “This is so funny when he tries to open the door.” Tim Conway’s slapstick played out on the screen in front of us.
“Yeah, yeah.” Mom nodded too quickly, her eyes racing around the room. Her rote fingers threaded through a tissue on her lap like it was her old rosary.
“Can we call my bank today?” she asked, for the fifth time. “I need to close all of my accounts. I don’t have a house. I have no place to live. I have to get my money so I have somewhere to live.” Her eyes rimmed with tears.
I accepted the role reversal, me as the coddling parent to my mom, the frightened child. Still a night owl, she needed exhaustive coaxing to go to bed. Lucy, whom Mom now called “Good Dog,” remained vigilant outside Mom’s bedroom door each night, the tinkling of her collar alerting me to any movement in Mom’s room.
Days later, I watched my feeble mother board a plane to return to Michigan. This woman whose travel had spanned continents, now feared flying. Her bottom lip trembled when we handed her off, in a wheelchair, to a qualified but distracted flight attendant. I couldn’t leave her.
An older woman with a beehive hairstyle touched my arm. “I’ll keep an eye on her,” she said. “I remember what it was like when my husband was like this.”
She bent down close to my mom’s face.
“What’s your name?” she asked Mom and then stayed with her as the attendant pushed the wheelchair onto the plane.
Subsequent phone conversations with my siblings resolved nothing about Mom’s situation. Optimism flitted between us as we each, at different times, caught a flicker of the woman we used to know. But there was nothing to resolve. Her agitated forgetfulness and irrational fears made her a danger to herself. None of us wanted to make the decision to end her independence, but we all agreed that she could no longer live on her own.
Weeks after I watched Mom board that plane to Michigan, Lucy began to wither away. My husband started the conversation about Lucy’s failing health.
“Do you want me to be the one who decides to put her to down?” he asked.
I hated the ease with which my husband asked that question. Nothing about this was easy. Lucy’s ultrasound revealed organs overwhelmed by tumors that explained her aversion to food, yet she showed no signs of pain. Every morning she fanned her feathered tail as I stroked her thinning body. How could he put an end to that, an end to her? I wasn’t willing to accept another loss.
“But she’s still eating a little. And she wags her tail every time she sees me,” I reasoned.
While I knew my argument was weak, I tried the same rationale with our vet days later.
Lucy had always loved going to the vet. I watched other dogs being dragged through the vet’s doorway, but year after year Lucy bounded in, announcing herself with the audible shake of her collar and a tail that rearranged everything in its path. She owned the room, slipping behind the reception counter and wrangling her way in between the clerks. Entering now, at only two thirds of her former weight, Lucy didn’t bound anymore. When I told the vet how she still greeted me daily with a wagging tail, he nodded.
“It’s in her breed,” he said. “Retrievers are very devoted. She’ll wag her tail until her final breath.” He stroked Lucy’s frail body. “You need to decide how long you want her to go on like this.”
Lucy’s favorite clerk, the one with pawprint tattoos running the length of her forearm, brought me a new bottle of anti-nausea pills. As I read the label, she sat down on the floor and nuzzled my dog.
“You need to start eating, Lucy,” she crooned. “Promise me you’ll eat, baby,” she pressed her cheek against the whiskered muzzle. Lucy’s tail thumped on the floor.
It’s been three months since I agreed to let Lucy go. The vet was right; as Lucy lay across my lap in his office, her tail swept the floor even as she took her final breaths. In our house, her collar hangs on a cabinet door, near Mom’s old bedroom. Whenever it jingles, I’m taken back to the late-night conversations with my mom that only Lucy shared.
Mom now lives permanently with my brother, housebound mostly by her choice. I’m grateful she remains physically capable, but I mourn the loss of her spirit, her freedom. We Skype when she’s up for it. Sometimes she remembers flowers we planted or one specific winery we visited. Other times she barely looks up, distracted by the need to sort through her purse, which her caregiver tells me happens often now. She’s cared for by a 24-hour assistant as she fills her days sweeping and re-sweeping the interior courtyard of their home.
I remain a night owl, alone. I work at the desk where Lucy once curled herself, warming my feet. The desk sits just inside the doorway of Mom’s former bedroom, the room she strolled out of in her long flannel nightgown, to wrap her arm around my waist while sharing a news article or a new pillow pattern.
While my husband sleeps upstairs, I go to the kitchen and drop two slices of bread into the toaster. As I wait for them, I gaze at the photos on the refrigerator of my two late night companions. I run my finger along the edges of the Mom’s panda photo, smiling back at her face that’s lost in a wide-open smile.
My toast pops up. It’s wheat, yet I smell cinnamon. Toast crumbs fall to the floor. They will still be there in the morning. I spread butter across the surface, place the toast on a napkin and switch off the kitchen light. In the living room, I find the afghan and settle on the sofa. I wrap the blanket around me, tuck my feet to warm them, and yearn for a familiar arm around my waist.
MJ Lemire’s work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Cosumnes River Journal, and Literary Mama. She’s been a regular columnist for UC Davis’s In the Know and fiction editor of American River Review. MJ lives in northern California, working on a collection of essays and teaching local first graders to read.