Two Women, Two Mothers

     "A freshly fallen silent shroud of snow. . . " 

    We've had so much snow this February that it's hard to believe that we're not even halfway through the month. It was so still, so quiet during yesterday's gentle snow fall; a complete contrast to the storm of the previous week that came in like a lion, and attacked the island as if it were her prey, for two days. 

    My mother is in a nursing home with a broken hip. We are not sure if, when, she will be discharged. She can run her mouth, bark demands, bellow orders, but she cannot take care of her physical self, her physical needs. She calls me, my sister, and my dad to complain and command; but she cannot command her legs to move as she needs them to. She cannot control her life anymore. 

    It's hard to watch. 

    It's hard to be on the receiving end of the vitriol. 

    It's hard to not be able to see her because of the strict COVID rules. 

    I had to go through her papers the other day- which was awful and awkward. Especially when I found photographs of my grandma, my mother's mother, in her coffin dressed in the peach chiffon gown she wore to my parents' wedding in the mid seventies. I gasped and dropped the photo, horrified. Gingerly, I picked it up from the table, and examined it carefully: the dress, the coffin, the flowers, and how Grandma looked exactly like herself and nothing like herself at the exact same time. 

    And then I saw the date: February 5, 1994. The date on the calendar: February 5, 2021. Had she really been gone twenty-seven years? Did my mother remember the date of her mother's death? Was she thinking of her mother as she sat alone in the nursing home? 

    We had a COVID-style funeral for my grandma in 1994. The roads were shut down, the airports closed, the island in the grip of an ice storm that made it too dangerous for any mourners but immediate family to come to pay their respects. 

    Grandma was always ahead of her time. 

    I'm trying to end this piece by tying the two storms together, and then saying something profound about the unpredictability of the weather and of relationships. 

    But instead, I am taking a trip down memory lane: me hiding by the creaky door that separated the hallway and the kitchen eavesdropping on my mother and my grandmother. They're sitting at the Formica table in a haze of cigarette smoke. Lipstick-marked coffee cups and a half-eaten Entemann's crumb cake rest between them. I can't make out their exact words, but I hear laughter every so often, and the cadence of the conversation is soothing. 

    Two women, two mothers- a stolen moment on a Sunday afternoon. 


    

    



Comments

  1. Beautiful writing. It’s so challenging especially during this pandemic, when you want and need to be with your mother. your vivid description of listening to the two women in the kitchen took me way back to a similar time in my life.

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