My Mom's Red Rain Boots
When my mother couldn't remember anything anymore, she still knew one thing: she loved my red rain boots. She loved them again and again. Each moment brought a new opportunity to see them for the first time. Her eyes would travel from my face to my feet. "Oh," she'd say. "I love those red boots." She no longer perseverated on how I hadn't visited her -- even if I had just come to see her the week before. It was now beauty she fixated on. Over and over, she loved my red boots.
I bought her a pair of her own red rain boots in size 6-and-a-half. She was like a proud 8-year-old in those boots, her smile beaming out, her double-jointed knees bending backwards as they had, I'm sure, since she could walk. She still went outside with me back then. An itinerate walker, a lover of nature, I'd take her out to the path across from her memory care center. We'd take in the birds and the tall grasses. She never missed a flower or a bird. Now she had her own red rain boots, flashing red with each step she took.
I knew that she was no longer being cared for at her memory care facility when I found her boots stuffed up on a high shelf in her closet. I took them down and placed them on the closet floor again where she could see them every day. The next time I came, they were back up on a shelf, buried beneath clothing that had floated around the facility with other residents’ names sewn into the collar. I lost sleep knowing that she was being attended by people who didn't know her. They did not know she loved those red boots, and so I knew they did not love her.
I moved her to a new facility on Cedar Lake in Minneapolis, the trees visible from every window. During the move, I needed a break, so I took her to Target to pick up a few things for her. I worried about her tripping and falling, so I asked her to hold my hand. She resisted like a toddler. "I don't need to hold your hand!"
"What if I want to hold your hand, Mom?"
She looked at me suspiciously and then reluctantly took my hand. We walked across the parking lot, my mother impossibly smaller than she'd already been. When we reached the automatic doors she said, "We've come full circle."
"What?" I asked, incredulous that this woman who'd disassociated my entire life, sometimes not recognizing me even as a child, for this one fleeting moment might grasp the enormity of where we were in this Target parking lot.
"You're taking care of me now," she said. "Thank you."
That was six years ago. I thought then, if this is the last cogent thing she says to me, I am complete. It turns it was. Almost.
Over the next six years, I visited her, sometimes multiple times a week and sometimes only monthly. My favorite way to get there was through Theodore Wirth Regional Park. I'd put it in maps for quite some time, allowing me to pay attention to the sights along the way. Oh yes, I'd remember, I turn here on the parkway, past the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, where I'd take her in her red boots when she was still walking. One time, in the glorious Fall, we walked along the path in the dappled light. The path got wider and as I held her hand with my left, I could feel my dad's in my right. They both loved being in nature. Our vacations were not car camping, but strapping packs to our little backs, and hiking into the Sierra Nevada Wilderness. So, it was fitting that I found my dad's spirit beside us in those gentle woods.
I’d read her poetry, mostly Mary Oliver. This was how I learned to be in the silence with my mother. This is how I leaned to trust that our souls were doing their own thing, convening, being mother and daughter, or some other relationship entirely from another lifetime. Sometimes, I would turn away to cry, not with sadness, but with poignancy of Mary Oliver’s words floating between us. My mother mostly stared blankly. On a good day, she’d close her eyes while I read, and then open them as soon as I finished. She’d nod sagely, as if there was no dementia, and I would read another. Over poetry, I believe, this is how our souls convened. Over years of tangles between us, poetry was the final elixir, the unknotting of disappointment. Just last week, though I did not know it then, I read to her one more time.
My mother died this morning. She was at peace. Her face without worry or fear, her skin as smooth as a newborn, death erasing all the complexities her mind had held fast to. To say Alzheimer's was a gift would be a dishonor to what, especially at first, must have a terrifying loss of memory, a losing of her place in what Mary Oliver called "the family of things." But for us, along with poetry, Alzheimer's was a return to the essence of what it meant to be mother and child; a chance for our souls to rise up and communicate as they had perhaps when I was a newborn and even when she was a newborn. Alzheimer's is off-roading, beyond linear time, into deep pathless woods, beyond speech. Alzheimer's has been a reckoning, a map back to what truly matters.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I bought my mom a couple new outfits: comfy pants and easy on-off tops. One of mom's Kenyan caregivers asked me to get them. He said her current clothes were too difficult for them to get on her. "She doesn't need that drama," he said, laughing his deep laugh that I will miss along with my mom. I took away the ill-fitting clothes, removing the only drama she had left. I also took the red boots, knowing she didn't know or care what was in her closet anymore. I've been carrying them in the backseat of my car, thinking I'd consign them. Now they're back inside my bedroom, reminding me of her love of red, our walks and the small ways I was able to make her happy.
One day, while driving to see my mom, taking the back way past the wildflower garden, I realized I didn't need the map anymore. I turned off the GPS. "End of route," the screen read. I drove past Cedar Shore and remembered how fast Cedar Lake came up. I will have a memorial for my mom in that wildflower garden, I think then and I know now. The sign for her facility is hidden by thick foliage in the late summer. It was finally then, that I knew how to get to her from all directions: on the highway, through the park, or along the backroads from my condo. I finally know all the roads that lead here to Mom.
It's taken me nearly 62 years to circle back to her, to the primacy of being her daughter. The compass of awe and gratitude has always been steering me; the amazing gift of being born -- 1 in 400 quadrillion chances, some scientists say. The gratitude for her sacrifice has always outweighed any struggles we had. I've finally learned my way here, through the woods, over highways and backroads through the aliveness of the woods, just in time to say thank you and goodbye once again.