The Week I Can't Find the Words

Friday is my mother's celebration of life and I am still mostly memories.

This week I need to write the most important piece of my life so far and I can’t find the words.

Friday is my mother’s celebration of life. I want to stand up and honour her the way I honoured my father when he passed a year ago, by telling the people who gather who she was. I have been sitting down to write it and nothing is coming. So I thought I’d start by telling you about her.

Her name was Vera Mae. I called her Mom.

She was one of eleven children, raised in Springhill, Nova Scotia, during the war, in a house with no indoor plumbing and a basement with dirt floors. I think about that house on Grey Street a lot. I think about it because the woman who came out of it raised her own family in a home so clean you could have licked the concrete floors in our basement and tasted nothing but Pine Sol and pride. She cleaned the way some people pray. It was a joy to her. It was never a chore, never a duty but an actual joy, and I don’t think I understood that until I was much older and started to see what it meant to come from a dirt floor and build yourself a different one.

That part of her never left. A little over eight years ago she was diagnosed with dementia. Slowly, then less slowly, the woman we knew started to slip into a different version of herself. We moved her and Dad into Parkland, a private assisted living community, when living independently was no longer safe and became too much. Just over one year ago we moved her closer to my sister and me into a more secure level of care when she began to wander and get outside and, ironically, the day before my Dad passed away.

At her first care conference at the new place, the staff told us she liked to spend her days making the beds. My sister and I looked at each other and laughed out loud because of course she did! That was the most Vera thing they could have told us. The problem, they explained gently, was that she was trying to make them with the residents still in them!

I tell that story because most people lose the ones they love in pieces and the cruel trick of dementia is that it takes the wrong things first and leaves the right ones behind almost as a tease. She forgot the rules of cards. She did not forget that a bed should be made with crisp hospital corners.

She loved a good game of cards. 45s, crib, crazy 8’s with her grandchildren, whatever was on the table that night.

She and Dad played with her sisters and their husbands every Sunday while we were young. Her sister Carol and husband Allan continued to play with them weekly after they settled into Parkland, for as long as they could even when Mom could no longer follow along. They arrived every week with treats and the kind of company that doesn’t ask anything of you. They came because they loved her. They came after the rules of the game had left her and they came anyway, and that, more than almost anything, tells you who she was. People kept showing up.

She loved to dance. She and Dad square danced. They took ballroom lessons. They were of the generation that danced with many partners across an evening and she lit up on a dance floor the way some people light up at an altar. After a serious car accident where we nearly lost both of them in 1993, Dad came out of it with a head injury and neurological symptoms that made dancing harder for him. She still loved the music. She still loved to move. She didn’t stop being someone who loved to dance just because the dancing got more complicated. She found new dance partners and became more social because of her connection to a tune. I think about that too.

She loved the deer and birds. Picture Snow White as a 75 year old grandma, and you could see my mother 11 years ago. She fed apples to the deer in her yard at home, in direct defiance of what the town asked of residents who were trying to keep wildlife wild and every winter she threw kitchen scraps onto the back deck for the birds and every spring she complained, bitterly and without irony, about having to scrape and repaint the deck. She knew exactly what she was doing and she did it anyway. Every year.

This week, I have been seeing finches. I have been seeing deer.

On Tuesday I came back from visiting my dad’s grave and pulled into the underground parking of my building, in the city, and there were four deer standing on the grounds! I saw more deer on the drive home. I don’t need anyone to explain that to me.

She struggled her whole life with anxiety and depression and when I was young there were times I couldn’t get from her what I needed. I want to say that here because whatever I write for Friday will be honest too and I don’t know how to honour her by leaving out the parts that were hard.

What I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that the resilience and leadership that I have came from somewhere and most of it came from being her daughter.

I was her primary caregiver for the last fifteen years. I sat with her at more medical appointments than I can count. I also have very fond memories of her letting my sister and me skip school for little shopping adventures, the kind of small ordinary mischief a girl remembers her whole life.

She was healthy as a horse. Two of her sisters are living or lived into their 90s and we all assumed she would too. In December, one year to the day that Dad went into the hospital, she had a sudden stroke and she never really came to. We never heard a word try to escape her lips. She fought but there was nothing left. It was very hard.

That’s part of why the words won’t come this week. The other part is that I want to get it right for her and grief doesn’t sit down when you ask it to. It shows up when it shows up, in the middle of a sentence, in the parking lot, on the drive home.

I work best with a deadline. The deadline is now arriving and I am still mostly memories (and puddles).

Sunday drives to the Springhill homestead after church, stopping at Fletcher’s Restaurant for a sandwich, the hour to her parents’ house, cousins everywhere, Sunday dinner. The smell of a clean house. Her at a card table. Her on a dance floor. Her on the deck in winter, throwing scraps to the birds and dropping the phone mid sentence when she’d spot a deer, often forgetting I was still waiting. Her at her last home trying to make a bed with another resident in it.

I will find the words by Friday. I always do. But this week I wanted to write to you from inside the not finding them because that feels more honest than pretending I have already arrived somewhere I haven’t.

If you’ve ever had to stand up and speak about someone you loved with your whole life, you know what this week is.

Vera Mae. My mother. One of eleven. Lover of cards and dancing and deer and birds. Cleaner of floors. Skipper of school days with her daughters. Maker of beds, sometimes with people still in them.

I’ll see you Friday, Mom.