For the next 6 weeks, one of my brothers (or I) would visit her each weekend. Weekend trips eventually became week-long trips so we could provide 24/7 care and help manage her pain. I remember arriving for my shift in the middle of October. The aspen were brilliant in orange and yellow; the air was crisp; elk were on the move. On my previous trip she had been walking around and making jokes. On this day, she was bedridden. I walked into her bedroom to see how she was doing and had to walk straight out again. Sitting next to her bed, on a little stand, was a bell. The kind of bell that you might find in a small shop to attract the attention of the proprietor. It was the same bell that she placed next to our beds when we were children staying home from school while sick. We rang it to call her when we were scared and wanted her to talk to us or read to us. Now it rested next to my mom's bed.
The next week was hellish. I learned to wash my mom's dentures... to swab out her mouth... to assist her to the bathroom... and to clean her up afterwards. I learned to give her shots in the abdomen... to administer anal suppositories... to fold her blanket/bolster just the way she liked it (in fifths!)... to manage her morphine... to light her cigarettes... and, later, to lift her out of bed and put her on the portable toilet. Eventually, I started sleeping next to her bed on the hardwood floor because it was easier than stripping and remaking the bed in the middle of the night. Such depths. I never knew. When not cooking, cleaning, and administering drugs, I read to her from Little House on the Prairie which was one of her favourites.
When the week ended, I told my brother that I would stay on because the time was near and it was far too much work for one person to manage. I made a pre-arranged call and three cousins arrived within 48 hours and stayed with us that final week: two of my mom's nieces and a grand-niece, none of whom my brother and I had ever met.
That week was the most wonderful/awful time of my life. Laughing, joking, and caring mixed with coming to terms with death. It's not something I want to do again, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
My mom died early in the morning on October 31: All Saints Day, or Day of the Dead, depending on your beliefs.
A week later I was driving back toward California, thinking, crying, drifting aimlessly, when I saw a sign for DeSmet, SD.
The next night I wrote the following:
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I spent last night in DeSmet, South Dakota, where many of the Little House on the Prairie books are set.
I toured the surveyor's house and the house that Pa built for Ma after Laura married Alfonzo. Then I went out to the old homestead site.
I leaned back against the cold monument and watched 5 cottonwoods battle the wind... the same 5 cottonwoods that Pa had planted for Ma, Mary, Laura, Baby Carrie, and himself some 125 years ago. It was somewhat surreal to sit there and watch a storm bear down on me from the north. Behind me, was bright sunlight. In from of me, out across the prairie, total darkness. I leaned against that monument, mesmerized by the approaching storm, and felt the lives of those it represents: Pa and Laura twisting straw into bundles so it would burn; Ma and Mary, grinding wheat all day long to bake a single loaf of bread; Alfonzo taking a sleigh out across that prairie in the dead of winter, looking for a farm that might, or might not, have extra wheat for sale; children lost in a blizzard trying to get home from school; Laura and Alfonzo's first house burning to the ground; Mary's blindness. Tears froze on my cheeks as I contemplated their hardships.
The temperature dropped from 40 to 30 to 20. My fingers and toes became numb. And finally my core body started to cool. But I felt rooted to the spot, as if I were waiting for something. It seemed the boundary between the living and the dead was weakening. I could hear their stories. I could feel their lives. The Big Slough was off to the left; Silver Lake off to the right. The cattails of the slough were about 3 feet tall. It was easy to see how blowing snow could cover the top of the grass and make the slough look just like the rest of the prairie... especially at night. A trap waiting for someone to try to drive a sleigh over. A nasty trap.
I shifted slightly and tightened the hood about my neck to blunt the cold. And as I did, a different set of visions filled my mind: Laura, snuggled in bed, listening to Pa play his fiddle; Alfonzo coming home with the wheat, saving many from starvation; Laura's almost primal way of experiencing the world through her senses -- the smell of the rain, the feel of the Earth between her toes or wind through her hair, the sound of music all around her, the sight of colors and textures, the taste of Christmas candy; Laura loving, with all her heart, her little corncob doll; ... and the way the Ingalls helped other families to enjoy each and every moment of their lives. It was as if their hardships were not important. No, that's not right. It was as if the hardships were necessary to fully appreciate how wonderful life is... as if they were lenses which magnified and focused the things in life which were truly worth seeing.
I remembered words I had read in the museum that morning:
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
She thought to herself, "This is now."
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
I heard a contented sigh behind me, but when I looked behind the monument, I saw nothing but the wind... heard nothing but the prairie.
Roused from my daydream, I rose and walked stiffly to each of the cottonwoods in turn. I lay my hand on the trunk... feeling the texture and noting the color. I stuck my nose between the bark and breathed deeply. I listened to the wind and those voices from long ago... from right now.
And I felt contented.
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Oh, and that bell? It now rests on my desk, beside me.
Rest in peace, mom.