So Small

I listen.  I often refer to myself as a sponge; I absorb the worries and fears and doubts of others, helping them to cleanse themselves, to wring out their problems, to seek solutions.  The thing about being a sponge is, you soak it all up, but sooner or later you have to be wrung out yourself.

My mother has cancer.  It's in her mouth, where Roger Ebert had his.  She's had surgery.  Radiation. Chemotherapy.

She's back in chemo.  The cancer is still there.  It's spread into her jaw.  The strident voice I remember is raspy now, straining to manage every word.  But still strong.

My whole life my mother has been a big woman to me.  Physically, yes, she was large.  But she was far more than her form.  My mother was a nurse.  She's retired now.  She's worked mostly in nursing homes, looking after others.  Her mother did the same.  My father was a corpsman in the Navy.  Retired.  He was in Vietnam.  I guess looking after others runs in the family.  I'm a sponge, remember.

My mother has always had this grand, bombastic personality.  She's big.  People remember her.  I guess I inherited that, since people remember me as well.  I look at my parents and I recognize the bits and pieces of them that make up me.  My father's sense of humor.  My mother's boldness.  I see the good traits and the bad that I've absorbed.  Some I denied for a time.  But I've come to know who I am, and how I am my parents' child truly, and yet still my own being.

Nobody knows how to drive me mad like my mother.  She frets and fusses.  She comments on my hair and my face and my clothes.  But she makes jewelry, like I do, ironically BECAUSE I started doing so and she picked it up from me and ran with it.  I'm very certain I get that creative streak from her.  On the other hand, I am good at concoctions.  Cooking.  Crafting.  Repairing items creatively.  That came from my father.  So I guess I received my artistic tendencies from them both.

My mother has the biggest heart.  I've watched a steady parade of cats and dogs pass through that house since I was a kid.  Virtually all were broken animals that my family fixed.  Wild under their porch.  Abused by a neighbor.  Abandoned in a shelter.  Trapped in some forsake puppy mill.  Some didn't last long, succumbing eventually to illnesses and injuries gained before they came to my parents.  Some were with them for years DESPITE such woes, and surely would not have lived so long anywhere else.  All of the cats and dogs I grew up with are long gone, and still they carry on, taking them in.  I remember the little cairn terrier with the back problems from the chain it was constantly on.  I remember the wild kitten somebody had brought into our apartment building and left to run loose in the hall.  I had to run back and forth up and down the hall to catch it; I am so tall that when I bent down it would zip the other direction.  It was a him. Caliper.  His mother we'd seen around with other kittens.  We think they all died off, one by one.  She came around the day we took him to the vet, to say good-bye.  We have birds.  We couldn't look after him.  My parents did.  He suffered all his life from parasites and ear problems, but he beat everybody's predictions and lived a good life with them.  He came when he was called, with the dogs. He thought he was one.

And they took in our daughter.  When my wife became pregnant despite being on the pill. When all we had to look forward to was adoption, because we have no insurance and were barely scraping by ourselves.  My parents stepped in.  Our daughter lives with them.  This means we do not get to see her regularly.  This means we get to see her.  She is happy, she is healthy, she is a wonder, and I have my parents to thank for this.

Two weeks ago, I talked to my father, who told me that my mother's cancer was not going quietly.  He insisted we should visit.  My father rarely insists.  He's a soft-spoken man until you get him going on a topic.  Last week I called my parents and made arrangements to come see them Wednesday; our 'weekends' are Tuesday-Wednesday.  Monday my mother suffered a terrible allergic reaction to one of her medications and went back into the hospital.  We didn't learn this until we arrived yesterday.  We wouldn't be visiting her in her home.  We'd be seeing her in a hospital bed, and briefly at that.

My mother used to be a big woman.  She looked so tiny in that bed.  I'd brought a necklace I'd made recently to sell that she wanted to look at.  I'm happy I remembered to bring it; she still wanted to see it, looked it over, felt the work, examined it twice. We talked for a bit.  My father did as well.  My wife.  Our daughter.  We left, went out to dinner, went back to my parents' home before the long drive through the night to our own.

I've never seen my mother so small.  But that was just her body.  I looked at her, at that shell I barely recognized... at that spirit I knew in a heartbeat.  My mother looked so small.  But there's the old saying about books and covers.  My mother looked so small. But she is still so very big.