Amazing Grace

 

Talking with my mother is harder now. Sometimes her responses to what I say don't make sense, as if we were having two completely different conversations. She seems to know this, and avoids the issue by simply listening. I walk her through the news about each family member and at the end she says "tell me more!" and I can't think of anymore to tell. But more often when I get there, she tells me she's frightened. Yesterday was one of those days. "I'm frightened, I'm frightened!" she said, clutching my arm. "What are you frightened of?" I ask. "I don't know, I don't know, I've forgotten" she says. 

We walk to her room and I settle her in her chair, then I sit on her walker and hold both her hands. I wonder what I can say to this unknown fear. 

Remember this, I say, and I slowly recite Psalm 23. You see, you are in the valley of the shadow of death right now,  but you don't have to fear anything bad, because the Shepherd is walking right ahead of you, keeping you safe. 

She says "it's so hard to believe that."

I nod, I know, it is very hard.

To fight off the fear, we sing. We sing the first verse of "All people that on earth do dwell" and "How great Thou Art". We always sing "Amazing Grace", which is her absolute favourite. Sometimes we sing a random song that pops into my head. Yesterday it was "this little light of mine" but often we sing "Anything you can do I can do better" which we sing so raucously that once a carer came running to make sure nothing was amiss.  Sometimes when we're singing hymns other residents wander in and sing with us before meandering out again. My mother and I are in entire agreement that none of them sings as well as we do. Sometimes we sing "If you're happy and you know it" but yesterday I sang, "If you're grumpy and you know it". 

"But I'm not grumpy!" she says. 

You so are! I say giggling. 

"You'll never go to heaven", she says sternly, "you laugh too much". 

Not at all, I say, I'll get to those pearly gates and St Peter will say "ah, Lisa Emerson! You were a great one for laughing, come right in". Of course, he'll take one look at you and say "Hmmm. Grumpy Jean. What ARE we going to do with you?"

She smacks my hand. "Child abuse!" I shriek.  

"Oh you!" she says. And then, "I'm so glad you're my daughter". 

I squeeze her hands. "And I'm so glad you're my mother", I say. 

"Really, truly? Even now?" 

Truly. Even now.  

It seems to me that I've spent the year thinking about what it means to be a mother, to be a daughter. 

A few months back, I went on a three-week pilgrimage in Italy, a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Francis and St Clare. But Francis and Clare rarely appeared on my radar during those weeks - it was all about Mary. Everywhere I went, it seemed, there were paintings of Mary, paintings of all sizes across hundreds of years. 

 She was a grave girl with a book looking hesitantly into the eyes of an angel with gold spread wings. 

She was Everymother, looking down in wonder at her child. 

She was a stately queen, the Madonna, a woman gazing out into the world with clear, all-seeing eyes and calling it her own. Mary. I became quite obsessed. 

Perhaps part of my preoccupation can be attributed to the fact that, while I was in Italy, my eldest daughter was heavily pregnant, with a baby girl whom she planned to name Grace. Grace was to occupy a special place in our family: the first girl of this generation of our family - the eldest daughter, of an eldest daughter, of an eldest daughter, of an eldest daughter. My girl was due to give birth while I was in Assisi and it was hard to focus on 800 year old saints when my mind was on new life emerging at the other end of the world.  

 Our time in Assisi was carefully planned, but just a few days before my daughter was due, we had a half day to just wander around the town.  One of the leaders had mentioned this place where there was an art installation that was worth seeing. I looked it up: the chapel of Santa Maria Delle Rose. That was enough for me. I headed off with Google maps to guide me. 

The chapel from the outside looks like nothing special in a town filled with wonders. I stepped in and looked around.  

I was alone in the chapel. The space was full of light and, arranged in a circle, hung from a wood frame, were tubes, each containing small identical wooden statues of a woman. In front of this circle, was a tall, graceful carving of the same image in blue marble. A Madonna. 

  

A beautiful young Italian woman came quietly over to me and asked in lilting English if I would like her to explain the installation. Then she guided me over to the centre of the circle where, on a plinth, were hand-sized versions of this image in white marble. 

 "This installation is meant to be felt as well as looked at", she said. And she gently turned my hand over and placed the white marble Madonna into it. "This is the mother," she said. And to my utter astonishment I burst into tears. I mean, not gentle tears prettily brimming over the eyelids, but full-on messy sobs. 

The guide stepped back, stricken, her hands to her face. "I'm so so sorry!" she said. 

No, no, no, I stammered out between sobs. I scrambled for a possible explanation, something that might make sense to both of us.  It's just my mother, I said, in a dementia ward, and I'm so sad. And my daughter, about to have a baby and she is miles away from a hospital, and I'm so worried. I feel so helpless, so far away. And this, this, this.... 

I closed my other hand over the cool white statue, and held the mother of God in my hands while I tried to rein in my tears. 

Once my sobs were down to a manageable level, we continued the tour. There were 33 wooden Madonnas, one for each year of Jesus' life.  Each statue was carved in a different wood, all of which had been collected from all around the world. And the statues were beautifully carved so that, from different angles they conveyed the Madonna differently: "you see, here, if you hold it this way, the Annunciation; this way she is a pregnant Madonna; here she holds her child - and then, turn it this way, she is a dove, the dove of peace". The circle that held the Madonnas was held from a central point on the high ceiling, "You can see the A and the O. The Alpha and the Omega," murmured my guide, "The Beginning and the End". Yes, I could see. Perhaps that was why I was crying. 

 The next day, I woke up to the news from my son-in-law. Baby Grace had been born safely at home. And I remembered my mother sitting beside me in church, just a few days after my daughter had been born. I held my precious child wrapped in a white shawl on my lap and glanced at my mother whose eyes were filled with tears. "Is something wrong?" I whispered. "No, no, nothing is wrong," she said, "it's just...I am a mother of mothers" . 

 I am a mother of mothers. Grace is here.  

 

 

There will be time....

 

Things have been rough for my mother recently. We are not reading Psalm 23 anymore. Instead, we read angry psalms, like 142 and 143, and even more often Psalm 22:

I am poured out like water,
    and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
    it has melted within me.
¹⁵ My mouth^[d] is dried up like a potsherd,
    and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
    you lay me in the dust of death.

My mother listens intently, nodding. And then the psalm pivots into praise, and she brushes away tears. She says, “that is so right”. And she smiles.

It is so hard to sit beside this slow decline. To watch her dignity stripped away, inch by inch. And yet there are bright times. She came to our place for dinner to say goodbye to Lizzy as she headed to Australia, sitting at the head of the table, the matriarch of the family. And today was a good day. 

 

After we have read angry psalms and got that out of our system, I ask her what she would like me to read to her. We’ve just started reading through Luke’s gospel, taking one or scenes at a time. Sometimes she chooses the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe instead. But today it was Luke – Mary’s Magnificat and the birth of John the Baptist.

I gain as much as she does from this reading. In order to bring things alive for her, I have to concentrate on detail, and I notice things I might have skipped over if I’d just been reading to myself. Today, when I put down the book, she seems to have had the same thought: “it’s such a detailed story, it almost seems real”.

It was real, I say.

She consider this.

Just think how exciting it must have been, I say. They’d been waiting for the Messiah for so long, and when John came, everyone must have been thinking “maybe this is it!” despite what Zachariah says.

Then I say in a mock dramatic TV-voice, IS this the one who was promised all along? ARE the promises of Yahweh about to be fulfilled??? Expect the unexpected! Tune in for next week’s episode for a surprising turn of events! Dum, Dum, Duuuum!

Oh, we should end readings at Mass like that, my mother says. So much better than [boring voice] this is the Gospel of Christ – thanks be to God. Where did that “Dum, dum, duuum” come from?

I think about it. 1960s Batman children’s programme, I say, and we both laugh. 

 We’re not making much progress through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, she says. And I say not to worry, we can finish that after Luke’s gospel, There’s time for both, I say, there will be time. (I hope this is true.)

There will be time, there will be time, she says. Where does that come from?

T.S.Eliot I think, I say, and I look it up. The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock! I should have known that!

Yes, she says. What kind of professor of English doesn’t know that?

I start to read:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is stretched out against the sky,

Like a patient etherised upon a table….

Stop, stop, stop! she says. I know this, How do I know this? Read it to me again.

I read the lines again, while she sits enthralled with her eyes closed.

We keep reading, stopping after every few lines.When we get to In the room, the women come and go, she finishes off the line, with an air of triumph. I wonder what the women were saying about Michelangelo, she says.

When I read about the yellow fog rubbing against the window pains and licking the corners of the evening she stops me. That doesn’t make sense!

Imagine the fog as being like a cat, I say, and we read it again and she claps her hands with glee.

There will be time, there will be time, I read…time for you and time for me, and time for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.

Stop, stop, she says, I can’t go on. It’s enough. I’m full. It's so….what’s the word? Ambitious? Everything?

Enigmatic? I suggest. Evocative?

Yes, yes! Both those words, she says. She sits and thinks a little. Then she says, I don’t remember the poem, but I do. It’s like remembering a dream, or someone telling me about a dream – I can’t find it in my mind, but I know it. I know it. Do you know what I mean?

Yes, I do. I know what it’s like to have poetry so deeply inside you that it reaches back further than your mind, resting in your belly. Maybe I learnt that from her. I don't know anyone else who learned poetry by heart before they started school, as I did.

As we walk along the corridor for dinner, we recite, over and over, “In the room, the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo”. If anyone hears us they’ll think we’re crazy, says my mother, as I settle her at the table, drop a kiss on her head, and head out the door. 

 

Tonight, I was walking one of the dogs at sunset, and in a gap in a hedge, I watched the sun gleam for a moment, just before it dipped beneath the turning earth. Dark thin clouds seemed to gather around the light, but the confluence of the dark etched clouds against the gleaming colour was so beautiful. The evening is stretched out against the sky, I thought. 

I am so grateful for these bright colours as I walk, reciting poetry with my mother, while evening slowly falls.

 

Mourning glory

 

She’s gone. On Wednesday morning, our youngest daughter flew to Brisbane to study and work for two years. She is 21 and it is time for her to head out into the world - and I’m glad and excited for her.  After weeks of angsting (I had to say to her one day “Lizzy, you know you’re not going to Mars, just to Brisbane. You can get home!”), on the day itself she was simply joyous. It was wonderful to watch her bright face as she waved and then turned lightly to step towards the airport gate.

The house seemed strangely quiet when we got home. I told Bruce I needed to be on my own, that if I had to make the effort to talk to someone I would break. He understands that, and he left quietly for work. The dogs and I sat on the couch and watched Wicked. After that, I was together enough to take a deep breath and walk into her room, switch off the salt light, unplug the fairy lights, gently close the door of the empty wardrobe. 

This is what parenting is for, to prepare our children to launch into the world. I wanted her to go freely, unburdened by worrying about us or her grandparents. I know what it’s like to feel constrained, to feel that your parents can’t manage without you. I watched Josh, Lizzy’s boyfriend, shoulder the weight of his extended family’s grief (no-one in their family leaves Whanganui, and his mother looked at Lizzy like she was stealing her boy). I’ve carried that weight all my life, and I do not want that for my children.

These last two years have been all about closing doors. Some have slammed, suddenly and unexpectedly, like work. Some have slammed so hard, I've felt pain, as if my hand were trapped in the door - like when I had to take my mother to dementia care. The end of being child of the mother I knew. Others have been a slow creaking, like the church I left behind. But this parenting door has closed so softly. I have had just a few months short of 40 years with children in my home – longer than most parents ever have, because of my two bonus babies. Forty years of parenting, perhaps more than half the length of my life. If I close my eyes, I feel overwhelmed for an instant by all the times I have failed, but then there comes with a rush a kaleidoscope of joyous movement.

The scent of babies, the dancing of toddlers, homework and music practice and cricket and the singing of bright-eyed children, and conversations with curious adolescents whose burning questions about the meaning of life always seemed to erupt just when I was ready for bed. So much to treasure.

 

  This closing of doors has been disconcerting - perhaps because they all seem to have closed at the same time! Three years ago I was a professor, a solver of other people’s problems, a contributor to endless committees, a preacher and elder in a large church, a mother, someone's child. Now I am…..well, that’s part of the question, isn’t it?

What I can see – an I’m only just learning  - is that the closing of doors should be mourned. The grief and loss are real. But they are never the whole story. And for me right now the doors that are opening are different to those I would have recognized in the past.  

Last Sunday, I was the preacher at lovely little St Oswald's church for the Feast of the Presentation in the Temple, or Candlemass. Candlemass is a pivot point: we look back to the light and joy and hope of Christmas and forward to the grief and pain and loss of Lent and Holy Week. We must have both. And it is in the tension between the joy and hope of beginnings, and the grief and loss of endings that resurrection happens. 

There is an invitation to quietness now, to take my time, to sit in wonder before a mystery. To paint my mother’s fingernails a disgraceful scarlet and read her favourite books aloud, to gently place a host on her tongue. To imagine my father as an outrageous adolescent, with a literal gun in his pocket, as he tells his stories. To walk in the streets of my childhood home with an old and loved friend. To sit among the bluebells, to listen to the soaring music of Evensong in an ancient Cathedral.  To simply watch the fish in my fish tanks, rejoicing when each new translucent baby appears. To see childhood in a completely new way as I build a house of sticks on the beach with my grandson. 

I’m unused to this quietness, these unfamiliar doors, and sometimes I fret. “Have I lost my edge?” I asked Bruce anxiously this evening. “I haven’t noticed’” he said, not looking up from his book. “What if this is an early stage of dementia?”, I ask Anne. She nods at my concern, “don’t worry – I’ll tell you.”

But mostly what I feel is peace. And a sense that I’m being rewired by hands unseen, by a voice that bids me rest.