i will always love my mama, she's my favorite girl
my mother sits in a wheelchair beside my father, her gloved hands holding his. she wears a brilliant blue dress just the color of her eyes, though it's obscured by the yellow gown we all have to wear now when we visit daddy. i watch the two of them, their eyes meeting as they nod to each other and speak a silent language only those who have been married for almost 61 years can understand.
she has been here at his side, most every day since that first day — february 6th. before the day that changed so much, i'd see her walking down the hall in her crisp denim pants and neatly pressed blouse or tailored jacket and i'd think: wow, i wish i could be that beautiful. in these weeks since daddy has been in the hospital, mama has seemed to grow more beautiful. she waves at the nurses in the hallway, the members of the lift team, the care partners — by now she practically knows all their names and they know her, a quiet but kind woman whose beauty they see, like i do, in how she cares for my dad.
now though, she can't get herself here, has to depend on others and on someone else's schedule to see the man she has been married to since she was 24.
it seems impossible to think that they are now both on such difficult but parallel paths. daddy works each day to regain the strength he had when he walked into the hospital so many weeks ago. mama works to walk again, too, but for entirely different reasons.
in the middle of our day-to-day journey, there is something to celebrate. mama turned 85 years old today, and we had a party, just like we might any other birthday, with a picnic lunch in a side room and with yellow roses requested specially by my daddy, with cards. but we also celebrated by watching her learn to wheel herself down the hallway toward my father, so together we could cheer him on to lift his arms, shrug his shoulders, breathe on his own.
this might be a new challenge for mama, but it is not the first.
betty jean mccormick byrum was born on april 12, 1928 and raised to be strong. to stand up for herself when need be, to fight back, even when she didn't feel like it. she has shown this to me over and over as i have grown up. when my father was sick and dying at 39 — and yet he didn't — when her family presented her with challenges — and especially right now.
she. carried. on.
i wish i had gotten that from her. the pick everything up and steady the load and keep on walking kind of thing. she did a lot of that, the mother of three and wife of a doctor who was often with other people's families. she picked it— us — up, and gave us a pretty wonderful life.
i tend to leave life all on the floor — as evidenced by my bedroom closet and my home for the past few months — hoping someone else will come behind me and make everything all straight. usually mama. when i was a child, she usually did.
there have been moments in my life though, when i called on my 'mama' instincts and took care of the impossible. all by myself. picked myself up and moved through what i didn't want to, because i come from her stock.
now it is my turn again.
you know i am a storyteller. this comes sometimes much to my parents' chagrin. might i tell too much? in their eyes probably... i hope only to tell the important.
mama is not one to share many stories about her childhood. i can remember, though, times when she shared a bit. how roosevelt died on her birthday. how she met my father at a medical school dance. (and my, was she beautiful.) how they lived their first married year with a
.
my favorite betty jean childhood story is the one when my grandmother sent her to the store to buy a loaf of bread, but wouldn't you know it? a new movie — "the wizard of oz" — was showing at the local theater. the 11-year-old betty jean rode her bike to the store, got the bread, and several hours later — maybe she sat through two showings — she emerged from the dark theater, too late for my grandmother's sandwiches, but she was a changed little girl.
weren't we all changed by that movie? our grayscale worlds turned suddenly into color by the wind?
in these past weeks, it feels like the wind has taken our colorful world and upended it, picked up our settled family home with it and crashed it down so rakishly that we don't know which end is up. and the whole world has turned to grayscale again.
we are not alone. a church friend one day this week said her 97-year-old father had the same injury as my mom, her own mother already in 24-hr care. she wept, telling me her story, and all i could do was hug her. i understand. add her to my now pages-long prayer list for families like my own.
my siblings and i have often joked that our family is just so beige. to the outside world i am sure that's how it seems. we tend to cling close, though i am the one who puts the story out there. neither of my parents have been comfortable with my writing about them from time to time, but i hope one day they will understand why.
today is my mother's birthday. all the grandchildren called her, and one even came to visit. she sat next to the love her life and held his hand. and he told her he loved her, one more time.
it was an honor to be with them as they shared their own private celebration.
today we celebrated my mother and my father. brave souls, both.
ps: a favorite college song was 'i'll always love my mama' by the intruders:
watch the video here and dance!
susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
richochet, II
there is an apartment building in chelsea in NYC with a glass front (well, there are thousands), but a few years ago, the new york times magazine featured it in a photograph, which i can't find now. but in each backlit apartment in that small world, simultaneous living played out before the viewer's eyes. dancers practicing their steps. mothers feeding supper to anxious toddlers. a cellist leaning into her instrument. a lone woman watching tv. floor after floor, side-by-side, people lived out their lives unbeknownst to voyeurs, or to those who shared their walls.
i have been thinking about this for weeks, now, how on any given day at the same time of day, my children are doing one thing and i am doing another, far away from them, the walls between us never melting away. how when my son makes a phone call to a client in raleigh, my daughter walks the dog to doggie daycare on the upper west side in manhattan on her way to work, as my husband checks the drudge report for the morning headlines and i wipe up the kitchen before heading out to work.
parallel lives, it feels like. for this family who used to share the same space, once upon a time. now when we do, it's for usually for a few hours — on a church pew, around the kitchen table, opening presents on Christmas morning. a few hours. not nearly enough.
i will confess that until recently, i have not thought too much about the parallel life i had been living with my parents. every few nights i'd call home and find out about their days, and though i worried sometimes about them driving to and from the doctors office, or not having enough to do, i didn't picture them living life out in a lighted box next to my own lighted box.
in the past two months since daddy has been hospitalized, we have developed a new routine for our lives, all of us in our little lighted boxes. my brother works, my mother drives back and forth, my sister calls, comes home when she can. we have shared the lighted box at times, all of us converging in whatever glass-fronted room holds my father at that moment.
those back-lit boxes came back to me the other night, as i thought back to my wednesday, a week ago. how at lunch time, my husband came to my office to share a hot lunch of beef stew and green beans with me, while my mother sat in my father's hospital room talking to him, watching him breathe in and out. how my brother, at the same time, walked the corridors of the hospital to see patients as sick as my dad. how my sister, back in iowa was going through her day.
at 2 p.m., if you could hold up the glass box and look at our parallel lives, here is what you'd see: my brother talking on the phone with my mother. me sitting at my desk, sending emails, making lists for the rest of my day and another of what was in my father's doctor's bag years ago. my sister likely texting her daughter, who was on her third day back at work after the baby. we all stood in our separate boxes, miles apart.
the moment i learned mama had fallen, i felt the walls fade away and suddenly we all stood in the same room again. this family who once-upon-a-time sat at the kitchen table and shared fondu on saturday nights. who themselves shared the church pew on Sundays, who warmed the seats as my brother played basketball in the old high school gym, who once rode all the way to newport, rhode island in a tiny ford torino, just to see where my parents had once lived.
sharing the box these past weeks with my birth family has been something powerful, even in the middle of this very hard thing. in the box together, we make jokes, we pray, we look at old pictures, we cry. we laugh at the absurdity of what we face together, what my parents face.
this week, we have sort of retreated to our boxes again. my mother lies in a hospital room down long hallways and up elevators from my father. i'm back at work, as is my brother, and my sister moves between our parents, having her turn at trying to keep up with both of them, though neither is moving very far.
my sister-in-law told me the other day that i had to finish richochet, because it didn't end as most of my stories do. i have thought about that, too. but how to end a story that just doesn't have one yet? i wish i could invent something, but anything i dream up means i am just fooling myself.
and so i will just keep going in my own little lighted box, watching as the walls fade away every now and then when my family gathers. and i'll keep writing the un-endable story, until the words finally push me through.
susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.