My mom’s ankles were as large as small tree trunks. And as immobile. My dad pushed her around the small patio that acted as their only thruway to the outside world spring through autumn. They were a spectacle as curtains moved in each window that faced them. Sometimes one of my mom’s feet would ride underneath the toe plate, scraping the walkway. She didn’t know it because she couldn’t feel it. It was only after feeling as if the chair was skidding on a caught stick or rock that my dad paused and readjusted her toe-worn shoe. I looked at anything that drew my attention from it. I listened for anything that would block the biting drag of her shoe. It reminded me of gnashing teeth. Riding in the county van for those with disabilities wasn’t an option considering the jolting, and my parent’s hoist-less vehicle provided no respite. Even if they had had a hoist, she dreamt herself in small crane, it moving a body that wanted to move but cemented itself from the embarrassment and the disease. How dare these metallic wheels imagine themselves as her legs on occasion.
Inside was a small apartment meant for the old and infirmed, for those that had perhaps lost touch with the physicality of life, with the beautiful things that life can bear. My sister was visiting that day too with my twin nieces, one of few memories I have left of all of us together.
My mother suffered a fall about five years ago. Long-suffering from degenerative disc disease before the fall, although capable in many ways. Her broken arm complicated the already complex routine that my dad and she followed. My dad was forced to quit work and care for my mother every minute of every hour of every day. I’m still angry with them for their lack of foresight about their lives.
Five years later, they are worse for wear and no closer to a life in which they used to play and pretend. My mom is at once lethargic and lucid, aware and atrophied. She has since lost her tree trunk-like ankles and has replaced them with twigs. Her slippers look like two weighty perched birds. I spoke with my dad the other day. He told me in a quiet way that he was having some problems of his own. He mentioned that he wished the same thing for himself as he wished for my mother. I chose not to read into that. It’s the time between yesterday and today that crushes them in such an absolute way. I try to drive north to see them and bring my own family. It’s an intimate thing to be touched and to lose that sense over and over. To be noticed and talked about again.
They are a beautiful half of a whole that diminishes with time. I look at them and wonder. I wonder how their intimacy forges and re-forges itself each day, my dad’s devotion branded and seared by moving my mother from her bed to her chair and back. I wait for the day that a stranger calls to tell me they have both finally flown away.
