Mom's Last Great Lesson

By Helene Ellis

As a Red Cross nurse in the early 20th Century, before Public Health became organized, Elizabeth, our Mom, traveled throughout the Hoosier heartland assisting mothers with newborns. Every day for nine days after the births, she returned to encourage new mothers in those scary first days of life. As a public nurse with a kind receptive manner, she was assigned to secure health services for a population suffering the silent sexually transmitted diseases. She served families terrorized by the Polio Epidemic of the 1940’s. Mom became a key liaison for University of Michigan research on Phenylketonuria, PKU, the debilitating protein deficiency that retards the tiny brains of newborns before they are even a year old. In 1965, Elizabeth attended to victims devastated by the astonishing double-barreled tornado that ravaged the Indiana/Michigan border.

Elizabeth remembers none of this. She has no past and she cannot consider any future. Her memory loss rapidly steals her from a family that looks to her with deep admiration. She taught us so much: the stamina of kindness, the importance of making decisions at critical moments, how to tell a good story. She taught us the power of loving in crisis and in calm. Her intellect resides behind a fog in her brain.

We must speak with pause to give her time for messages to penetrate the fog. We are grateful that she recognizes us as her people. She uses well-honed social skills to fake her way through the mysteries facing her. But the memory loss strips even the previous sentence from discussion. We cannot say, “Did you sleep well last night?” She looks at us quizzically, “I don’t remember,” she answers. We cannot talk about anything in her remarkable history. She remembers none of it. We cannot say, “We’ll take you out for ice cream tomorrow.” She may smile and say, “Oh good.” But in the next moment she will have forgotten that we told her such plans.

And therein is the lesson—the Moment. Her granddaughter calls her the ultimate Zen experience. No past. No future. Just the moment now. Though she still enjoys a little ice cream at the residence, she doesn’t know it’s coming, and she can’t remember the pleasure when the dish is removed.

Hope is waning. Then there is guilt. Guilt that she is not home as our culture insists. She lives at a kind and loving Mennonite Residential facility. Her husband, nearly a century old himself, cannot care for her. Their house is not safe for the frail maneuvering her condition demands. The family is unable to be attentive every hour, yet the cost to pay or even find reliable 24-hour assistance is almost impossible. Guilt is a powerful force dominating much of our family stress.

Considering these two dynamics—Guilt and Hope—we experienced an epiphany: Guilt lives in the past, Hope lives in the future. With Mom, precious Mom, we only have the present. And it is Now that we must cherish. We must shed old styles of communication that exist in the past and future. Everything must be Now.

We wheel her chair through gardens to enjoy the color and design of flowers. We show pictures of grandchildren to which she honestly says, “They are lovely, though I don’t remember them.” We pet the soft golden retriever, herself a creature of the Present, that resides at the facility, or watch the colorful finches live their lives in a glassed community near the dining room. We sit and smile at Mom. She at us. We mouth I love you to each other.

Past and Future thinking are two great gifts of our humanness. But the dominance of these two elements leave us weakened in another powerful force: Now. We aggressively clutter up the present with memories of the past or plans for the future. Wise ones have warned through the centuries: We only have the moment. Live in the Moment.

Even Elizabeth, from the sculpture of her life, gives paraphrase to the wisdom of the ancients. Granddaughter interviewed Elizabeth several years ago in which she asked, “What advice for healthy living would you give to others?” As if by example now in her last great lesson, she told us then, “Regrets should be limited. Thoughts should dwell in the present.”

Helene LaBrecque Ellis was a utility writer for many years in community work in Hillsdale County. Living now in Capitol City area with more time to write fiction and essays.