Transformation
We no longer perceive metamorphosis in our world in the way Ovid wrote about it, but when my mother took to her bed, she was neither sick nor well, neither dying nor continuing to live the life she had. What else defines metamorphosis?
What my family lacks is a story.
I believe my mother tried to contain her sadness by withdrawing and growing root-bound. When a plant outgrows its container and isn’t repotted into a larger one its roots grow round and round, halting growth. Just so, my mother got her children to the brink of adulthood, then her roots began to grow round and round, tighter and tighter. But mortals cannot decide how much pain is enough. So Atlas, god of endurance, punished her. Her pain grew until it bulged out of her. The first repair surgery failed. So did the second. The bulge grew and grew until eventually my mother’s left side looked as though she had a pillow under her shirt. Or a newborn swaddled there. Then the hernia grew some more until it was so large her arm couldn’t hang straight but fell in a curve as if around a child’s shoulders. The surgeons said, Give science ten years. And so she waited, the caretaker becoming the cared for. She changed from someone who gave hugs to someone who didn’t like to touch or be touched. The hernia, filled with her own intestines, locked her into an awful embrace with herself, a diabolical punishment for a person who had always struggled to believe she was lovable.
“I love you,” she would say, even before she was sick.
“I love you, too.”
“Do you?” She needed the repetition like a drug.
“Yes! I love you very much.”
Even when the exchange went as she hoped, she looked sad.
Where was Eleos, goddess of pity and compassion? Or Artemis, reliever of disease in women? Or even winged Hermes, god of thresholds and boundaries, who might have softened her fall?
WHAT HAPPENED ISN’T COMPLICATED. It doesn’t take a long time to tell. When I came home after college, I moved back into my old room, which was the largest. The house didn’t have a master bedroom with a bath, just the three bedrooms and one full bath on the second floor. My large room was originally the room my brother and I shared when we were young, my parents had always had the midsize room, and the smallest bedroom was my brother’s. With my mother’s health in decline, my father was more often than not sleeping on the sofa downstairs. We thought they’d both be more comfortable if we moved her to my room, and I would take the downstairs guest room until I found my own apartment.
I emptied my closet and drawers. I boxed up my books and Steiff and glass animals. I went to a department store and bought my mother a new bedspread, picking one with lavender hues I thought she’d like. My father and I changed the bed’s orientation so that it would be easier for her to get in and out from either side. He built a little wooden step for her, hoping that would also help. My brother bought a beautiful old mirror for over the dresser, which reflected the opposite window and added to the airiness of the room.
When everything was ready, we filled the bedroom with flowers. It was August. My mother liked it well enough, as much as she liked anything then. Misery loves company, they say. My mother kept her shades drawn against the sunlight most days. She reveled in the TV news, all of it evidence that the world was rotten and she wasn’t missing much. With pain and depression her personality was changing.
It’s not a complicated story. One warm September evening we had dinner, I can’t remember what we ate, and my mother went back up to her room right afterward, as usual. I cleaned the kitchen while my brother went up to do his homework. My father played Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, loudly, so my mother would hear it upstairs. It was their favorite. I had another glass of wine. My mother had been in her new room less than a week.
It doesn’t take a long time to tell. In her old room, the place where she’d slept with my father for twenty years, her path in the night to the bathroom was out the bedroom door, turn left, three steps, turn right into the bathroom. That night, after we’d all gone to bed, she came out her new bedroom door, took three steps, and turned right off the top of the stairs. The night was moonless and dark. Because of the hernia she was misshapen, off balance, and wobbly on her feet. She must have been on her way to the bathroom. I’ve paced it out a thousand times.
Everybody trips on stairs at one time or another. It’s actually been calculated that you’re likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use a staircase. The two times to take particular care are at the beginning and at the end because most stair accidents occur on the first or last step. Not surprisingly, going downstairs is more dangerous than going up. More than 90 percent of injuries occur during the descent. When did humans decide we needed staircases in our homes? When and where did one floor become insufficient?
My mother fell nine steps to the landing and her head went through the balustrade overlooking the front hall. Her nose was broken, several teeth were knocked out, and there was a lot of blood. Her neck broke on impact, they said, but I know I heard her. It didn’t sound like her, but there was a sound.
The ambulance was not quiet when it came.
I have wondered: Did the Pastoral Symphony that night make her sad? Did it remind her she might never walk again across such landscapes? Which of us decided we should move her to my bedroom? We can’t remember. We won’t remember.
There was no funeral or memorial service and each of us healed around the tragedy the way a tree grows around a rock. My brother finished his senior year, got into a California college, and flung himself across the country. I didn’t blame him. He’d done his job. The parent he’d had his eyes on in the car was still alive.
My father moved to his basement apartment and I moved into my brother’s room and cleaned and covered the blood stains in the hall. No one came to visit or help. But I didn’t ask them to. I started gardening. That first spring I found a surprising number of shiny pennies on the ground, which signifies only that I was looking down all the time. Sue has a penchant for finding four-leaf clovers, but no one in my family has ever been that lucky.
Are we a family damaged beyond repair? I don’t know. I do believe in the power of words and stories to make sense of things.
I can still hear my mother’s voice: “You’ll be fine without me.”
Well, we are and we aren’t.