The hallways stretch out from the nursing center in a wheel and spoke pattern. I walk slowly down Sagamore Hall, as I have for the last four years, to visit the ninety-four year old woman who was my mother. She is too tired now for almost anything.

Sitting on her elevated bed, I reach my hand out to her slight body resting lightly on the egg-crated mattress, thin sheet covering thin skin. I put on my visiting face and smile absurdly into hers though I know her watery blue eyes see only shadowy ghosts in this life which is more of a dream now than her dreams.

I begin to tell her about all the things that are going on outside of this room. It is, after all, the best season here on the cold Atlantic coast, summer, and the mountains of snow and frigid winds have retreated for a time. She was born in January and loved the isolation of winter. Her isolation now is complete, without weather.

I tell her about the events taking place on the fringes of this new world she lives in; about the church dinners and bazaars, the summer fairs and parades, all the events she spent much of her life attending and volunteering for, since she moved from the smoky mill town in central Maine to the sparkling coastal plain here in the more lighthearted south.

I have begun to select my topics for conversation, leaving out the painful periods of the life we shared, hoping to assure her of the flawlessness our long time together is achieving in retrospect. I talk about the fantastic dinners she cooked: rolls leaping out of her hands like clouds, pies bubbling blue and red juices in her welcoming kitchen and steaming roasts on Sunday dinner tables, sauced with conversations from grateful guests by the thousands, if you counted them all up at once.

I tell her about the children who have gone on in their lives doing the magnificent things she told them they would do as she read to them and brought them into the light of her wonderful presence. I tell her about the Ph.D. one of them has earned and about the sibling now living in India, so far away from the hazy reality she lives in this little room. I tell her all of this for the thousandth time, though she does not ever seem to know of it and pretends to be surprised each time I repeat the stories.

I talk about what I am doing in my life since she left, since she wasn’t there to go shopping with or talk to on the phone seeing as she couldn’t hold one in her fragile hands anymore or remember my name or phone number really. The distance between us is growing every day as she prepares for her escape. I read to her from some of my writing, writing I never thought to share with her in the industry of our lives concerned, as it was, with taking care of the needs of children and family. She listens, the unraveling lacework of her brain trying to hold onto what meaning my words are making, receiving a fleeting impression and losing it just as quickly. She is amazed to think I could have this secret hidden deep in the body she fashioned for me; a body she always urged to utility and strength, but never imagined could create such meaning. It is beyond her understanding now, and she simply lets it go.

To all of this banter of mine, she seems to listen, nodding off for a few minutes without warning and coming back as unexpectedly. And when I press her, lean in and put myself into the center of her blurred gaze, call softly in her ear, “Mom, did you hear me?” she turns to me, gathers all of her consciousness to a fine point and reaches out to me, her eyes glowing a great loving sympathy, finding me from a long, long distance away.

And she blesses me, blesses me with the love of one who has seen beyond this world, who has seen beyond this room, and can not come back, will not come back, not even to make me, her beloved daughter, feel better.

About the author

Cynthia Fraser Graves taught English for three decades before retiring in 2000 to write full-time from her home in Kennebunk, Maine. Her previous work includes Eyes Like Jewelsand she is the recipient of a first prize in Nonfiction from the 2006 Ocean Park Writer’s Conference. She is presently at work on a novel titled Dusk on Route One. Her new book,Never Count Crow: Love and Loss in Kennebunk, Maine is available online at Amazon.com and at booksellers nationwide.

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