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| photography by Dave Shafer |
Remember the Simon & Garfunkel song “Homeward Bound”? I think my mother has been singing that song in a morphine-induced haze for weeks now. It is Monday, and we suspect that the doctor will release her from Presbyterian Hospital by the end of the week. A few Saturdays ago, she tripped on her oxygen tank’s tubing during the night, hit her head, and suffered a compression fracture to the spine as she collapsed on the floor. She didn’t call me until the next morning, after crawling to the bed, popping a pain pill, and going back to sleep. She is stubborn. Never mind that she might have rung for help via the Life Alert necklace that she ought to have been wearing but wasn’t. A cane would surely have steadied her, if only she’d been using one. She must have 10 or 12.
I have lost track of time. Life changes dramatically when you are more than 40 with an aging parent. The many hospital stays my mother has endured—and I have accompanied—since she first fell ill nine years ago with heart and lung problems have merged into one long catch and release motion—she gets really sick, we reel her in, resisting. We take her to the hospital where they fix her up (modern medicine is a miracle) and then we take her back in the car, releasing her again into the wild. In this case, home, which is as wild as it can be if you are 80 and living alone.
My mother has always been obstinate. After my father died in 1972, she refused to remarry despite popular expectations. When the insurance money ran out, she went back to work as a temp doing secretarial work—this after a successful career in advertising. She toiled until the last mortgage bill was paid, then retired. A 1950s-era ranch, her house is unremarkable by today’s standards, except that it is still standing. It might have fallen down years ago. Set atop underground creeks, the foundation is faltering, and the walls have deep cracks. My mother ignores all this. This isn’t to say that she doesn’t see it. It is to say that she chooses to focus on its former glory.
When we first moved to our house in the early1960s, it was surrounded by farmland. We’d walk to the corner to watch barrel racing on Saturday afternoons. As a first grader at the school a block away, I’d daydream, staring out the windows at the cows and horses grazing on the farm across the road. It’s all changed now. There are run-down apartments, drug dealers down the block, and a lot of houses with cracking foundations. The glory days included the many summers my sister and I picked peaches in the backyard from the fruit trees and wallowed in the lush grass that my father doted over. My mother’s tomato and pepper plants are long gone, as are her grapevines and the fig trees. The backyard is scorched and barren now except for a thicket of errant and unruly bamboo, which migrated decades ago from next door. Still, my mother yearns to go home.
So, what is it about home that makes us want to return, no matter what the circumstances? The answer, or maybe just more of the imponderable question, may lie in the mission statement for Meals on Wheels. Loosely paraphrased, it reads: The more old people we feed, the more old people can stay at home and don’t have to go live in those awful nursing homes. I’m a new volunteer with Meals on Wheels, and, ironically, the route I was assigned is my mother’s neighborhood. I drove it last week for the first time with our associate editor, whose grandmother also lives in the area. “Two streets away, that’s the swim club where I worked out every summer until I was 18,” I told her enthusiastically as we dropped off a hot meal to a widow in her 90s. The house had seen better days, but oh what a house it must have been—Asian ranch you might say, with its ornate wrought iron window coverings and a carved, arched door. A lot of my childhood friends lived in houses just like this one. She could be their mom.
It’s Tuesday now, and my mother is complaining that the doctors have decided to keep her another week. I am relieved. There is some peace of mind knowing that she’s safe and well cared for. But her books and all her memories are waiting—at home.
