Reading the Signs
It is late October in Southern Utah. Lingering summer temperatures have confused the trees, their leaves still green, not gold nor brown and curled. A Tuesday afternoon. I have finished teaching a poetry class and stop to stand on an upper campus hill to look west at a panoramic view of blue sky and white clouds. The breeze blows lightly. This last year has been one of several emotional detours: facing an unexpected surgery, settling my daughter into college life, assisting my mother through the challenges of dementia and the adjustment of being in memory care. Maybe it is hearing my students’ fresh voices in their poems full of confidence, or the false sense of summer, but on this day, for the first time in a year, I feel as if I can breathe, as if I can see a future unfolding like the sky and clouds, on the precipice of hope.
I have been reading current political commentaries by trusted analysts who back in 2020 curated the months leading up to that celebratory election with calming statements. “It’s going to look like Biden is losing, but in the long run….” This month, they are writing with the same reassurance, the same optimism.
I also had a lovely evening with my mother on the Sunday two days earlier, when I joined her for supper at her memory care facility, then walked with her out onto the patio where we took three laps around the edge, she moving deftly with her rolling walker. We watched a plane fly toward the airport only a few miles away. I scouted for roadrunners outside the patio’s fence. We sat beneath a canopy, out of the sun, and chatted with another visitor and their grandmother, until the sun began to set and the desert heat cooled down. I helped my mother get ready for bed, adjusting the blinds in her room so she could see the lights of houses in the distance—something she enjoys watching before closing her eyes.
She began to fall asleep. I sat in a chair near the window, thinking I should stay for a bit even while she was sleeping. Stay and put everything on pause for a moment. But I don’t like to drive in the dark and I had some other work to do. I said, “Goodnight Mom, I love you” to her sleeping self. For the past three years, since dementia began to slowly take effect on her mind and body, I have casually said goodnight when I leave. After the first few panic-filled days subsided into weeks, then years, I no longer think this might be the last time.
On this Tuesday, I feel as if the horizon is within me, opening up possibilities for my life and the future—
On this Tuesday, I feel as if the horizon is within me, opening up possibilities for my life and the future—a good omen, I think, for the election two weeks away. My premonition contrasts with my daughter calling me almost in tears about how scared she is if VP Kamala Harris doesn’t win, what it means for a young woman like her, for the country to endorse a such a blatantly misogynist man. How can she trust men her age to respect her if he is the template they think they should follow? We are a better country than that, I reassure her.
The next day, on Wednesday morning, my sister texts me that our mother is not looking good and seems very weak. Should I drive down? I text back. I look at the camera footage we have set up in her room and see my sister and the hospice nurse leaning over my mother’s face. She is propped up on three pillows, her eyes closed. Suddenly she opens them, looks up at the two faces peering into hers and rolls her eyes with a what’s all the fuss? expression. She’s going to be okay. I’ll come down this afternoon, I text back. A thumbs up reply followed with, She’s doing better. She's drinking some water and had some yogurt.
The feeling of peace and freedom from the day before has stayed with me. I gather my backpack and laptop, heading for campus to do a marathon of grading until another message buzzes through.
She’s going.
I call my sister, can’t get through. I stuff a bunch of clothes in a bag and start to head south from Cedar City to St. George, going ninety miles per hour down the freeway, my phone open to the camera where I see my mother, agitated, reaching out her hands, my sister next to her, and nurses at the foot of bed rearranging her blankets. Sobbing in my car, I can hardly see the semis I pass or the slower cars in the left lane I weave around. I finally get through on the phone to my sister.
“Do you want to talk to her? I’ll put you on speaker,” she says.
“Hi Mom, it’s your daughter Dani. I love you. You are going to be okay.”
But I can hardly talk, my voice high-pitched. What are the words to say to your mother who has been in your life for over sixty years?
I pass other landmarks, miss the correct exit, take the google-mandated detour, finally arrive. Mom is still agitated, her pupils dilated. I reach for her hands, and she grasps mine. I tell her I’m here. My sister, my niece, and I sit with her, take turns rubbing her arms, stroking her hand, telling her that everyone is waiting for her—her sisters, her parents, other family.
Before another nurse shows up with the morphine on order, she passes quietly. We aren’t ready to let her go but stay in her room while other family members arrive for a makeshift wake. The nurses bring a cart with snacks and water, and later, lunch. The feeling of peace, the horizon that I seemed to have embodied, is pushed out by a stunned grief, the room’s emptiness when her body is removed, a disorienting visit to the mortuary where so many decisions have to be made quickly, and a headache from so many tears.
I thought I would be ready, I thought I was prepared.
When I return to my mother’s home, her ballot is on the bookshelf where I had left it, thinking I had time to get it to her. What are the ethics of helping someone to vote who has dementia? My sister and I knew how she would cast. Even at the early signs of memory loss, when she saw a picture of the orange-hued #45 president on a magazine cover, she’d say, “Oh, he’s awful.” There was no question as to her choice, but neither of us got the ballot to her in time. One more vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington County would not have tipped the scales. But it would have been satisfying for that ballot to be counted, postmortem, as her final say.
On November 6, my mourning has a different focus than those in the nation devastated by the election outcome. We are planning our mother’s funeral, putting together the program, trying to get an accurate count for the lunch the Relief Society has so graciously offered to make. I haven’t processed the election results. But I wonder about that moment when I stood on the precipice of hope, where it felt like a future unfolding as vast as the western landscape, when I felt my mind clear of so many things. I think back to my last pleasant night with my mother. She seemed strong, calm, enjoying the dinner, the walk, the changing light toward evening.
I wonder about that moment when I stood on the precipice of hope, where it felt like a future unfolding as vast as the western landscape, when I felt my mind clear of so many things.
The only strange thing she said, as I raised the blinds to where she liked them, was “Who is that child out there?”
I didn’t look too closely, but answered, “It might be my reflection.”
Had I paused, paid more attention, would I have seen something or someone resembling a child? Had I stayed in the chair and held vigil while my mother slept, would I have seen a surreptitious Peter Pan figure slip in and tell my mother that she would soon be free to fly away to wherever she wanted? Was it her soul that touched me on that Tuesday afternoon, already beginning to feel unfettered by age, dementia, and other sorrows of her life? Was it her freedom I felt? Or was it the calm before the storm—a chance to clear my mind before the next wave that would bring to shore my mother’s death, a calamitous election, and a call to plan a stronger Resistance to “that awful man” and his misogyny than ever before? Or was it, as I would like to believe, a portent of brighter days on the horizon, a sign that in the long run, we as a nation will prove that we are better than this, as we face the lengthening nights ahead?
It is now mid-December. Another Tuesday. Tree branches are bare, students have headed home for Christmas, and I am finishing up my grading. At 5:30, I take a break and go outside to catch a few minutes of the sun’s last color. Clouds stretch in a pink swath across the western sky. Above the swath is the gray-blue night, below it the sun’s horizontal flare. I watch the blue become grayer, the flare gradually fade. The pink clouds darken but haven’t moved. They hold fast across the skyline as colors shine in the distance from strands of Christmas bulbs wrapped around trees and porches. A sight my mother would have loved to see—so many lights emerging in the evening—and one that I will seek out again tomorrow.
DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY is the co-editor of Blossom as the Cliffrose and the author of Drift Migration. Based in Cedar City, UT, Dubrasky is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Southern Utah University where she directs an Ecopoetry and Place writing conference.
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