Seeing My Mother After 18 Years

She fixed me with the firm eyes of frailty,

catching time

in a windless place,

her gaze more direct

than ever before.

We crossed back and forth to each other

on the bridge our eyes made,

freed of the constraint

that had divided us.

Something in me had shifted.

Judgment, blame and other miasmas

vanished like mist before a risen sun,

and kindness

became the ground

beneath my feet.

I simply stood at her left side,

leaning into her hospital bed,

her hand in mine as she dozed

or showing her photos of her granddaughters,

speaking softly of my gratitude,

or simply smiling down on her smile

lifting toward me.

She reached through the gauze of her mind,

one moment bright with memory,

the next clouded in soft misperception.

She spoke of my childhood nose bleeds

and the rush to Fordham Hospital

after I fell from a tree when I was eight.

Without pause, she said. “This bed

is too small and has mice.”

She asked me to stay the night:

“This isn’t my place, you know.

See if they’ll let you

sleep under my bed.”

I entered and left her room many times

in those two hours as nurses tended her.

Each return to unguarded vision a surprise.

Always there was her heart,

so near the surface,

its fear wrapped in an open hand.

So I became her babe in arms again,

held in her eyes.

Yet she was also my babe,

held in my eyes.

In the silence of that seeing,

we named the end

and the beginning

and all between…

and the wonder of finding

and of losing

and of finding again

and finally of the loss

that does not depart.