Light Has Lost Its Luster

My mother sits in a chair on the deck watching the first light of morning steal across the sky. She has lived 78 years of sunrises. She knows what’s coming. Yet, in her still-bright eyes, there’s a look of delight.

I take my tea outside and sit with her, the two of us shivering in our nightgowns. I offer her a sweater, a blanket, anything to take away the chill. She refuses the offer, refuses to admit the season has changed into something colder. Will turn to something colder still. It’s always been that way between us, me asking her to notice things she’d rather not see.

“Mom, it’s freezing out here,” I say, as my breath vaporizes.

“No, it’s fine,” she insists, as if admitting to the cold were admitting defeat. She takes another deep drag off her cigarette. The doctors have urged her to stop smoking, to quit the habit that may kill her. But she doesn’t stop. Nothing will convince her to give them up — not hypertension or the threat of another stroke or me.

In the face of life’s oncoming train, my mother looks away to a field of flowers she can’t quite see yet. It doesn’t keep her from insisting the flowers are there. It doesn’t keep me from trying to stop the train.

For years, my mother’s survival depended upon her ability to look the other way, to create a kinder version of the frequently harsh reality of her life. A single mother in a time that had little tolerance for it, she sought security by marrying my much-older father. He, a difficult, tormented man with three children of his own, also sought comfort. His first wife, the one he loved, died young. My parents had everything to gain by marrying each other. And everything to lose.

By the time my sister and I arrived, booze had pulled up a permanent chair at the table in our house. The unwelcome guest sat at every dinner, threatened every holiday, wept at every funeral and tore our already fragmented family apart.

My father died from drinking, and for a time, so did the rest of us. But all of us kids — hers, his, theirs — came through the fire. We were scorched, perhaps, but not charred clear through. My mother never even smelled the smoke. She was looking away, at a prettier picture.

That picture kept her heart from breaking, but it kept it from opening, too. Her philosophy was effective, of course. We do miss the bad stuff in life when we close our eyes. The trouble is, we miss the good stuff, too. Oh, not the easy good of sunrises but the hard-won good of being known, really known, by another person.

“There are worse things than loneliness,” my mother used to say. But when pressed, she couldn’t think of what those things might be. And so, a few years ago, she started telling me stories.

It began with little things, fragments of experience and feeling. Then later, larger pieces that told of her longings and losses. She glimpsed a part of her own beautiful, stark picture and did not turn away. I held her heart in mine and felt its shape for the first time. And then, overnight, it was gone.

The stroke wasn’t the sort that left one side of her face frozen in some contorted version of its former self. It didn’t put her in a wheelchair or send her to rehab or take away her speech. It just took away her stories and all the will to tell them. Between my mother and me there are miles of unspoken words. And now, they will never be spoken.

What’s left is elemental. I reach out more often now to touch her, caress her hair, hold her hand. A wordless language we both understand. I thank all the saints, whose names I have forgotten, for this old dialect.

My mother lights another cigarette and shivers in her nightgown. She looks away, toward some other sky. Maybe, in that sky the sun is warmer. But here, the days are growing colder. I know what’s coming.