Mother

For a variety of reasons I have been thinking about endings lately, about the final stages of things. I like to think of my life as an enterprise full of second and even third or more chances, but sometimes there is no second chance. Sometimes stages are finite. Childhood is finite.

This morning I was relaying the story of Friday's visit to the pediatrician with both girls to my mother. As is so often true when I am talking to my mother, because she is my mother, and by definition (mine) is required to tolerate me,a note of complaint threaded my story, the underlying message being that the excursion, involving as it had the drawing of blood, the eating of stickers, the incessant managing of behavior, had left me spent.

My mother, a wise but occasionally cryptic storyteller herself, said, when I had finished, "You know, a very close friend once said something I think about often." I waited. Trying to hurry the message out of her generally proves fruitless. "She said that when her mother, to whom she was exceptionally close but whose primary caretaker she had become, died, she had expected to feel a sense of relief along with her grief." I waited again. "But she did not."

The silence stretched. Finally, I said, "So what did she feel?" I know my mother's friend, and knew her amazing mother, but I also have some sense of how complicated it can be to be a caretaker in this fashion, responsible for someone you love most of all whose mind is intact but whose body is increasingly frail.

"She felt, along with her grief, a tremendous gratitude that she had been the person to help her mother through this difficult stage of life. That has hard as it had been sometimes, she now realized how much the experience had shaped them both. She felt lucky to have been that person. The person." That was it, I could tell. We talked about other things for a few minutes, then she had to go, and I did, and we said good-bye, hung up the phones.

There is beauty, I think, actual beauty, in the experience of being needed, and in giving what is needed when you are needed, even when it feels excruciating. There is always enough of you left when you do it even if it doesn't feel like it in the moment itself. There is a reason I need my mother, most, when I really need. There is a lesson in this for me.