My mother's bear

 

By Malia Watson

 

My mother's bear came to her wrapped in the arms of Kate, her dancing partner. When Kate arrived at my mother's house, she tentatively knocked on the door, unsure of her welcome until my mother pushed open the screen door and with a weary but warm smile welcomed her into the house. Kate had been in my mother's house many times before but once again was struck by the number of books there were in the built-in bookcases throughout the living room.

Books on Hawaiian flora, fauna, and history were beneath the poster-sized photos of my mother's hike down Kauai 's Koala Ditch Trail. In the center bookcase was her extensive collection of books on feminist theory and women's studies. Within easy reach of her blue recliner were the dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, and other reference books. Cookbooks, arranged by type of cuisine, were lined up neatly in the bookcase next to the kitchen.

As Kate entered the house, sunlight streamed through the louvered windows my mother had had enlarged to see more of the cactus garden she and my father had planted outside. Thirty-one years before, they had planted their first aloe; 18 years later when my father left, the cactus garden had spread to both the front and back yards. Now the agave ferox next to the mailbox threatened to topple the lava-brick wall that separated our property from our neighbors'.

Kate gratefully accepted the glass of mango smoothie my mother offered. The mangoes had come from the tree my parents had planted in the backyard in 1969, shortly before my birth. Its branches extended over the burial plot of Sandy, my brother's beloved mutt, that had become my mother's watchdog and faithful companion, and the greenhouse where, on many a Sunday, my mother contentedly tended her plants, adding vermiculite to that one, repotting another, while listening to Prairie Home Companion on the radio.

Settling back on the rattan sofa my mother had bought at a garage sale and had had re-upholstered in a cheerful Hawaiian print, Kate watched my mother regarding the bear in her hands. It was three feet long with soft, silky brown fur, glass button eyes, and a brown felt nose. Meant to comfort a child afraid of things that go bump in the night, the bear would comfort my mother as she struggled with, and eventually succumbed to, cancer.

When I arrived some days later from Texas , I realized that Kate had given my mother the perfect gift. Here was comfort that came easy -- or at least easier. The bear asked nothing from my mother. It didn't ask her what she wanted to eat, as I did; it didn't ask her to read the latest article on the curative properties of shitake mushrooms, as my brother did; it didn't ask her to forgive past transgressions, as my father did. We asked her these things as we saw her grow sicker; when the morphine drip was finally inserted; even when the home health nurse told her, as gently as she could, that she was "actively dying." We asked her these things, begging her, Please don't go. Please don't leave us.

Perhaps we were thinking of the Christmas she "saved" after my brother and father, heartbroken over my parents' divorce and our status as a "broken" family, had threatened to call it off. Or when she had kept my brother and me on civil terms even after we had agreed never to speak to each other again. Or when, years after the divorce, she had reached out a hand to Abby, my father's girlfriend, now wife, to pull her into the family circle.

Even while dying she made us feel loved, appreciated, and proud to be a part of her life. "I feel showered with love," she declared on the second to last day of her life as my father, Abby, and I bustled about, pouring yet another Ensure for her to drink, and massaging her feet. "You are a wonderful son," she told my brother over the phone as he wept inconsolably. He was en route from Tennessee when she passed away.

"He was lucky," my father declared, and I knew he was thinking that my brother had been spared the searing image of her body being carried out of the house in a body bag, and the echo of her voice as she cried out in the middle of the night, frightened and in pain. But he also missed the state of grace I felt as I held my mother's hand, lending her my strength, or when I cradled her in my arms, thinking there is nothing else in this world except this woman, this moment, and the love between us.

I think often of that moment, and the two weeks that preceded it when I took care of my mother, and the month after it when I sold most of her worldly possessions in a fog of grief. "This too shall pass," she told me as I left her bedroom so she wouldn't see me crying. She was wrong. Grief stayed with me, anchoring itself to my heart, until I grew accustomed to its weight.