Absolution

(An excerpt from Amy's memoir ARIAS )

Her breath was barely audible. It had been three days since they began the morphine. During those hours, praying by the bedside of my dying mother, I sat as she seemed to greet invisible visitors. With an “other-worldly” gaze, she stretched out her arm, reaching to someone, would gasp and smile – sometimes exclaiming in surprise, “hiiiiiiiiiii”.

Mother had secrets. She had been married once before Daddy and had successfully kept it from me until one, hot, deserty afternoon I interviewed her about her life for a grandmother remembers book and she stumbled over the details of her wedding day. “Where were you married?” I asked. “Richmond….Roanoke….Richmond….uhhh.”

“You don’t remember where you were married?” I asked. And then with a sheepish look like a naughty child, she confessed her sin - that she had been married once before to a man named Ed Smith. A big, Catholic church wedding in Cincinnati, Ohio and Daddy had been the best man. She admitted that she’d done it intentionally. She’d always wanted Lee and eventually got him. Ran off with him, two years later, with the blessing of her mother. She divorced in Reno and then, Lee and Elsie, married in a courthouse, in Richmond as it turned out.

Mother’s white, freckled skin, paper thin and marked by bruises and the battering of old age had always been rough and scaly. Ireland would have been a better climate with its mint green hills and misty, moist rain than the hot, yellow sun of California.

She loved feeding the birds and as I sat listening to the gentle purring of her last numbered breaths, I saw my mother on the front porch on Resh Place in a floral house coat, tossing stale bread into the air for the crows, whom she considered “pets”. Mother and the birds. Her yard filled with the music of birds chirping in the lush bushes of her yard - it is why I sang “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins at her funeral.

Mother, five feet two and three quarters at her tallest, now lay in bed, a tiny, diminutive frame less than ninety pounds, her body used up – the last of life squeezed out of it – wife, mother, homemaker, businesswoman, child – we’d reversed roles some time ago as the dementia stole her reason. She sometimes called me “Mom”.

Longing to exorcise the demons of her soul, the guilt of having broken Catholic dogma, obediently staying outside the church, denying herself Communion because of the sin of divorce, I called upon the priest to administer the Sacrament of the Sick. With the ritualistic oils, sign of the cross and crucifix, not unlike the ring of garlic used to fend off evil vampires, with the absolution and forgiveness of her sins and the promise of life ever-lasting, my mother died.

ALB June 2009