The Woman with the Empty Suitcase

I wrote this piece after a visit with my mother in August 2009.

I headed down the long hallway of the nursing home as I did every Friday afternoon.  I knew Mom would be one of the twenty or so confused Alzheimer residents lining the perimeter of an odorous, frazzled room where a television would be playing while no one watched.  As I slowed at the doorway, I could see her fidgeting in her chair. Her appearance was disheveled and her face distant and disoriented bearing almost no semblance to the woman who cuddled me at bedtime and made me soup when I was sick.  Our relationship had declined to where she no longer knew who I was and I could no longer unscramble her jumbled phraseology.  Normally, I would need to enter the room and then coax her up and out of her chair before I could usher her down the hallway to her own room.  But this time was different.  I waved from the doorway as usual, expecting to park my laundry cart and begin the coaxing process �" but my routine came to a halt as she looked over at me with a faint tentative smile, rose from her chair and readied to follow me down the hallway.  Already this had the makings of no ordinary visit.  Persuading her to sit on the side of her bed while I hung her freshly laundered shirts and sweaters became the next obstacle and finding some way to keep her from standing up repeatedly and heading for the door added to the challenge - thus, the inception of our “weekly sing-along” �" this had become the magical distraction that never failed to lull my mother to stillness.  Our opening number, in honor of her long-admired Judy Garland, is always “Over the Rainbow”.  My mother has had a beautiful singing voice for as long as I can remember.  In her younger days, I’m told, she sang at weddings and parties and I can vaguely remember listening as a child to her sing to my grandfather’s piano accompaniment of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”.  Though she now stumbled over the words, she still had traces of a singer’s trill and posed her head in a way that singers sometimes do.

 

We moved through our usual repertoire of her old favorites �" and now mine… “Bicycle built for two, Easter Parade, K-K-K-Katy, all the patriotic songs �" and as we sang, I worked my way through the folded clothes, turning to face her intermittently while I filled each empty hanger.  When I finished, I gathered herlaundry to take home, checked her drawers and finally sat down in a chair by her bed to continue singing.

 

I find it curious that when I sing with my mother, we look into each other’s eyes and rarely look away.  That kind of connection is something I don’t’ experience consistently in a day �" I shift my gaze often when speaking to another for a myriad of reasons.  My mother and I don’t �" we just sit there with gazes locked while our hearts coalesce into something resembling a long forgotten bond between a mother and a daughter while singing together.

 

I don’t recall what tune we were in the middle of but something happened during this most recent visit with her.  My gaze penetrated further.  I could see and feel deeply within her, past all that stood between me and her heart.  I could see the woman who used to be my mother.  She was as I remembered her.  Her hair wasn’t grey and messy but rather black and full and wavy.  She was the beautiful woman I could now only remember when looking at old photos.  But here she was �" embedded deeply in the heart of this confused, forgetful elderly woman who I can no longer talk to and only sing with.

 

I stayed for a while with that woman inside �" that woman who carried five children into this world �" a woman who was forced to let go of her first born to a war he would not return from �" a woman who could never find her way home after losing her bearings from the shock of it all.  She was telling me this �" this woman �" my mother.  She was hoping I would understand that the loss of her beloved son was too painful �" it was too much to bear and try to talk and laugh and live all in the same breath.  She reminded me that watching movies late into the night until she couldn’t keep her eyes open helped and that surrendering to that hard-to-come-by slumber helped too.

 

I listened and went deeper.  I saw an innocent young woman with her whole life before her.  She hadn’t a clue how to face the challenges that would come.  So as the years passed and her sadness deepened she watched movies and slept and cried in the dark, I suppose.  She said that her children and grandchildren, her parents, her sisters and her close friends were her salvation �" they helped her to talk and laugh and live �" they helped her to forget. 

 

But after sometime, even that wasn’t enough, it was too hard to juggle all of it �" it was too much to bear.  And so she chose to lighten her load.  She unpacked her cherished suitcase of memories and one by one, child by child, friend by friend, bid them farewell.  She said she watched as each one set sail and she told them she loved them.  She even said good bye to her greatest treasure �" the memory of her saddest story - the one that caused her to become so tired.  She said goodbye to that one also and with tears in her eyes expressed her love as it sailed far, far, away from her sight.  She needed to rest and now with her suitcase empty she knew she had nothing more to say.

 

And so we sing and that’s all she seems to remember.  Her eyes glisten with each note.  The woman with the empty suitcase sings with me every Friday.  But on this particular Friday she invited me into her garden and a mother shared and a daughter listened.  We met at the heart of the matter and I smelled the roses and heard the chirping of birds in her world for just a moment �" and instantly I knew it was time to empty my own suitcase of just one story �" the sad one that cried over a mother’s leaving.  We let go of that one together, she and I - and we sat across from one another singing our songs �" minus one more sad story.  The old woman who provides safe haven to my mother sits on the side or her bed and sings with me �" and with each song her smile grows and her eyes glisten and I know that my mother is near and that’s all that matters.