Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Every year on Mother’s Day I think about a guy I know whose name is Jim. Once upon a time he was one of my lawyers during a particularly stressful part of my career. As such his was a daily presence in my life for the better part of 1 1/2 or 2 years. There’s actually a lot of dead air during legal stuff. Time when for one reason or another you and your attorneys aren’t really doing all that much of anything but waiting. Sitting around and waiting, mostly.

Most folks I know who have had a drawn out legal whatever come to associate their own lawyers so tightly with the experience that they cannot separate the man or woman from the outcome. Mine wasn’t all that great. The outcome. But during all of those quiet hours with not all that much to do, Jim and I ran out of relevant stuff to talk about and started to share a bit of our backstories. What’s that got to do with Mother’s Day? I mean, two men trying to keep one of them from being destroyed financially isn’t the typical jumping off point to discuss mothers.

I’d met Jim’s wife, but it was a while before I realized that she was his SECOND wife and not the mother of his children. To keep my spirits up Jim and his partner on the case took turns hosting me at their respective country clubs for a round of golf. We must have been playing in May because Jim mentioned that he’d just gotten a Mother’s Day card from his daughter, an annual event. Over 18 holes together he shared the details of a rough marriage that ended in a rougher divorce. The details are not mine to share. Suffice it to say that Jim became a single parent and did such a bang-up job at handling what we all typically think of as the Dad stuff AND the Mom stuff (of girls!), that at least the one daughter thanks him each year on Mother’s Day.

Whenever I am asked I make sure to note that the simple act of becoming a father is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less commitment than that which is necessary to becoming a mother. We can start with the whole 9 months long thing where your body has been taken over by an alien being and my point is proven without even considering the whole giving birth part. To become a father one must simply deliver genetic material, something which can literally occur via FedEx.

All of this notwithstanding, we are not really talking about the generation of a child when we are talking about Mother’s Day. I mean, if we were, how could you explain Jim’s annual Mother’s Day card, right? Nope, on Mother’s Day we celebrate Moms. Women, and the occasional man, who wake up every day and do the kinds of things that prompt their children to call them “Mommy”. Whether they work outside the home or make their “living” as a homemaker, the women we celebrate are the women who are always and everywhere thinking about their children. Quietly or out loud they suffer and celebrate every bruise and battle won from day one until they are gone.

And that’s the point of today, isn’t it? I mean, we should be aware that Moms everywhere have been living and dying over most of what we did or are doing. I’ve yet to meet a Mom who, deep down, didn’t think their child would benefit from just a bit more parenting from their Mom. Job never done and all.

Where is all this going? I have no idea how often you talk to your Mom. I mean really talk. Pick up the phone or knock on the door talk to her. No matter how tough it may be to do so today you get a pass. You don’t have to think of any reason at all to reach out to your Mom so that you can hear her voice, and she yours. We should certainly do this a lot, right? But today you just gotta do it. For all but that tiny group among us who, like Jim’s daughter, had a mother but not a Mom, today you just find the time to call or drop by. It’s better than any card and sweeter than any chocolate you might send, the sound of a child’s voice on the other end of a Mom’s phone or knocking on the front door.

Because on your end of the call or the visit there is nothing sweeter than to tell your Mom “thank you”, tell her you love her, and to hear her say at least one more time “I love you too.”

Happy Mother’s Day Jim.

You never really know when it’s the last time.

Not gonna lie, I was more than a little bit salty that I was here, at home and on call this weekend, while my siblings and their spouses were gathered in the Low Country with Megan and Ryan. It was a lately scheduled get-together, dreamed up long after our office call schedule had been put together. Unwilling to pull the “I’m the boss” card, Beth and I were home with very little on our schedule save for the usual weekend stuff of early spring. Rather than a couples member-guest golf tournament to follow, the highlight on our calendar would be my first trip to watch two of our grandsons have a golf lesson.

Restless is the way Beth describes me on weekends like this. She is right, and if I’m honest with myself I really did want something to fill our weekend. Not that it would be the same as joining everyone, including Megan and Ryan, just something. Thankfully our friends R and C were up for a last minute dinner out, and my buddy Matt found us a spot at his fully booked restaurant, our favorite, with 24 hours notice. It was shaping up to be a really nice night.

Where do you sit on the “things happen for a reason” continuum? I’m firmly on the end that goes more like “things happen”, reasons or not. My Mom had been having what has become for her a pretty normal week. Days cycling around the dining room schedule, the time between meals spent now mostly in her wheelchair in front of random television shows, or snoozing upright with Alexa playing either Sinatra or Saturday Night Fever in the background. Mom is a big disco fan. Beth gets in to see her almost every day during the week. I try to get in once on a weekday, and then Saturday and Sunday mornings. For whatever reason we both missed Friday.

The first call came to Beth Saturday morning. Mom was really on the struggle bus. She was trying to eat soup with a knife. The staff on duty Friday and Saturday were mostly folks who’d just met Mom over the last few weeks. No one had really seen her in this state. They wanted to ask her doctor to send her to the ER, to do tests to find out why she had such a sudden decline. Now, going to the ER for something as amorphous as “she’s not doing well” almost always ends up the the “she” not doing very well. Tests beget tests, and older folks always have abnormal tests. Bright lights and alien noises create confusion where none exists; in the presence of a person no longer fully present anyway, the ER can be the final step from self which there is no return.

But Beth went in and walked the staff, and Mom, back off the ledge. Much of the discussion centered around uncertainty about Mom’s “final” wishes, questions that Mom and my sister had long ago addressed and handled quite nicely. Another call came later in the day, a few hours before our dinner reservation, and once again we were able to agree with the nurses that Mom was OK where she was. And so it was that we found ourselves at a cozy four-top with dinner on the way courtesy of a typically terrific waitress, telling stories about prior visits with Matt, the owner, settling in for what we all thought would be a typical 3+ hour visit. As our appetizers were being cleared Beth’s phone rang. Call number 3. Beth: “We really need to go in.”

This is where the “things happen for a reason” conversation really got started, and “the last time” thoughts began to tickle around the edges. The first was easy to process no matter where you are on my little continuum; if we’d been in South Carolina Mom would have already been sent to the ER. One or both of us would have been on a plane. We all would have been going to that “last time” place in our minds. But Beth and I were home, and whether or not we were home “for a reason”, we were nevertheless only a 40 minute ride to Mom.

As is so often the case this whole thing has been banging around in my brain since that first phone call. Like Brownian Motion, fragments of ideas, tiny thoughtlets moved through random synapses like so many molecules in a vacuum. Some about us, Beth and our siblings and the whole “Sandwich Generation” thing. But just like the focusing of those randomly moving molecules in a laser tube, everything really coned down to “the last time”.

Would tonight be the last time that I saw my Mom? Worse, was she really as sick as the nurses were telling Beth, and had I already for all intents and purposes seen Mom for the last time when we sat and chatted last Sunday morning?

We’ve already had a few last times. Thinking back you can see them. A few months before she finally capitulated, accepting the fact that she could no longer live alone in my “ancestral home” was the last time I saw the woman who was the driving force at the center of our family. Some time after that, I don’t really recall exactly when, I saw Mom as mostly herself, aware (and concerned) about everybody and everything, fully engaged in every waking hour of her days and nights, for the last time. Sometimes you can’t escape knowing exactly when the last time was. Someone is gone suddenly and unexpectedly, and the memory of that last time is seared in your mind. You are branded by the memory whether it was a good one or not.

This is not a story about regret, or regret avoided. Nor is it a case of the supernatural “things happen for a reason”, thing. Not at all. If we’d been in Bluffton it would have been a version of our Alaskan trip when Mom did, indeed, end up in the hospital while we were, all of us, incommunicado 4,000 miles away. This time, for whatever reason, I was here. I am fortunate to be the sibling who gets to be the one who will be “there” when Mom finally lands after this long, long glide path to the end of her journey finally arrives. Blessed to have such a loving and caring partner in Beth, who as always is carrying the bulk of the load.

And regret? No, I have followed the advice of my close friend Bill, the surgeon, who has counseled for so long that the time to say and do all of the important things is long before the last time, no matter how suddenly a “landing” comes after that last “last time” happened. If I am not there at the beside when her earthly plane lands and her soul

departs I won’t feel as if I’ve left anything unsaid. I have long ago begun saying those four special things I learned to say when the thought of a “last time” is but a notion. I love you. Thank you. Please forgive me. I forgive you. I have long ago begun saying versions of the same to the rest of my family and my friends. I hope, because I love them dearly, that my siblings will feel the same, at least when it comes to our Mom.

There have been many “last times”, and as a son there will be yet one more. I just may not know it at the time. You never really know then it’s the last time until it’s over.