Family secrets are a specialty, including lying, exaggeration, withholding facts. My mother had secrets and hid them so deep that nearly nothing could escape their secure burial. My brother decided that his cancer would be a secret. Death broke the seal. There I was, for his funeral or revellation, with more family than I had seen in ten years. Adults who were toddlers at the last wedding. My cousins with grey hair and wrinkles. The very youngest of us could be his own father. Eighty year old aunts and their children.
Ancient women came up to me, scarred by cancers of the breast, the bowel, the throat. All those cigarettes smoked in the sixties had taken their revenge. There were a few old men shuffling in the background, silent as always. Deaf and unwilling to speak. Waiting for the coming of death.
My strangely quiet father lives alone. I cleaned out a cupboard--removing ten year old bottles of remedies. I miss the ancient spice boxes in my mother’s kitchen. Cinnamon and pepper from her early married years. Time stands still if you shut out all light and all sound.
At my brother’s service, there were photos of this young, handsmome smiling man. Against it, I kept hearing someone telling me he aged, became frail and thin. At the graveside I began to cry as my sisters scattering his ashes. He was their brother. To me, the strange inhabitor of my parents’ youth. Ashes. Whose wife still hears him in the house.
I went, for the first time, to visit my mother in the locked ward where multisyallabic drugs keep her from responding to the terrible visions and sounds her dying neurons send. They are new secrets.
One can read the door's security code-- is in plain sight above the door in inch-high numbers. They trust that the patients cannot will not see it and that the visitors will not reveal it. Pills keep my mother calm. She is timid with us.
When we entered, she was slowly wandering up one side of the hall and down the other.
I wanted to pull her with us, run down the corridor, leap into my car and drive . . . where? My sons would think I was mad. There would be alarms. It would not end well.
Was the purse a disguise to help her escape or simply the only thing she had to hold? She has lost her glasses half a dozen times--also pens and drawing pads. Her clothes travel from room to room as each patient searches for something remotely familiar. There is very little to buy her--the next day she won't remember that it is hers. I took her flowers, her flowers, from the garden she tended in the past.
We sat and she told me what she can see outside. I resent the landscape in all its dull banal qualities. It can be cataloged in a few words: parking lot, trucks on a divided highway, service road, chicken processing plant a few hundred yards away, a dead tree, a partly demolished cinderblock building, a row of storage units.
My mother has no garden now—no birds, no squirrels, no cats, no trees to turn green and shudder in the wind and turn yellow in autumn and bleak in winter--only the endless movement of cars and trucks surging by, visitors parking, entering, and leaving. She gropes for the word for trucks. She kept saying “party” in place of whatever she meant to say. It is the drugs, blanketing her in cottony white thoughts.
When younger, she once woke me up at 2 am to see the Northern Lights glistening in the sky. We stood on the dew-wet grass and turned our heads as far back as we could to see vast colored clouds shift in the blackness, among white, silvery stars. A rare sight—secret messages from an unfolding universe.
On her hand, her ghost's hand, was a strange silver ring. Her wedding band and engagement ring were lost years ago. One day she found this ring--began wearing it. It is her marriage.
My son made a photograph of us--my mother's ghost, my father, me.
Then we left her. Promising we would be back. I entered the secret number from above the door.
Her last secret, yielded with the greatest reluctance—Burns inside me day and night. The living suffer with tongues, our hearts broken and baffled, until we, too, embrace eternal silence.
Secrets kept by ghosts.
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(R)ated for saqme!
This is painful and amazing writing. "Time stands still if you shut out all light and all sound ..." and "It is the drugs, blanketing her in cottony white thoughts..." And so much more. I understand and I loved your memory of watching the "secret messages" send by the Northern lights.
"your mother's ghost" -- *sigh*