On Thursday, March 24, my mother died. She was eighty-eight years old. My brothers and a sister-in-law had gone to lunch; although I called them as her breathing became shallower and shallower, they missed making it back by a couple of minutes. Looking back and forth from our mother to the parking lot fully visible below the wide window, I saw them drive in, park, get out, and walk toward us.
But they had been with her. Our middle sibling had brought her to the hospital Sunday night. The youngest had arrived from Colorado about three hours before I’d come in, and—living the farthest away, not having devoted the hours to her we had, those last few years, except on his visits, when he’d tried to compensate—had hardly left her side.
The funeral was Easter Monday. That gave my children time to fly in from the East and West coasts, and my nephew, from Colorado. It gave us time to get an obituary to papers, to gather photographs of her life to display. Time—to collect ourselves, to think a little. It made it possible to have a Mass. From that Holy Thursday through Easter, it would have been out of the question. Monday, she had one. Not a funeral Mass, mind you; it was still Easter Week. She had an Easter Mass, morning sun streaming through the windows, Easter vases overflowing with their lavish spring bouquets. She’d loved flowers. Gardening was the thing she’d missed most, once she couldn’t get around: the fundamental act of planting something with her own hands and watching it grow, she’d often said.
I had been traveling in northern Spain. The previous Monday evening, checking my email in Oviedo, I had come across the message from my youngest brother with the subject line “You Need to Call.” I’d sent him the phone number for the hotel, and before I could walk the several blocks back from the Internet center, he’d called it. What did he think, that I travelled middle-class, that my hotel had Internet access? The owner came dashing down the stairs to tell me, waving a message, as I paused on the third floor at his apartment.
“He phoned here?” I asked, amazed.
“Ahora mismo,” just now, he exclaimed. He and his wife were caught up in this, now, too— solicitous, kind, excitedly drawing me maps.
I had many calls to make, so I found a pay phone on a noisy street where Asturians were shopping, chatting, congregating for tapas to tide them over till dinner. I left messages at all my brother’s numbers, my frustration growing. I tried my other brother, and couldn’t get through to him, either. I went back online, messaging my children, a cousin, asking him and my son to try to find out what was going on. It was late when I finally talked to my brother. The news was certainly grave: Mom was in intensive care, her blood pressure low and various organs compromised.
Back in my spartan little room with the dark airshaft and the Sacred Heart painting over the bed, I ate the remaining chocolate cookie I’d bought that afternoon, walking back from San Julian de los Prados: the deceptively simple church of golden stone, a taste of glories to come in medieval Europe, hunkers now on the remains of its hill hard by a freeway. There was to be no time for going out to Monte Naranco in the morning, to see the other World Heritage churches raised in isolation while the rest of Iberia was occupied by the Moors; the rest of Europe, by the Dark Ages. I ate a banana and finished a bottle of water. I knew what I would have to do tomorrow, and sleep would be more useful than going out to dinner.
Twenty-four hours earlier I’d packed up in Santiago de Compostela. Palm Sunday: behind the cathedral a priest and the bishop had blessed the long, sometimes elaborately braided fronds, along with clumps of some leafy evergreen. Drummers and trumpeters in pointed, masked green hoods had led a procession around the Praza do Obradoiro in front, of a statue of Christ entering Jerusalem. Now I notice the umbrellas in all my photos, that I hadn’t particularly at the time, intent upon the rituals, the sounds, the colors. The tentative, warning sprinkle had increased, and all that afternoon a soft rain fallen, into the evening. The Atlantic haze and mist, the silvery rain darkening and polishing the ancient stones, had been a welcome change from the stark glare and heat—in March!—the day I’d visited Segovia.
Under my umbrella, I’d wandered the narrow stone streets of the Old Town after lunch, checking my email, making sure I knew how to get to the bus stop early the next morning, looking for a place to have dinner. There’d been music in the rain—actual music: the boys under the palacio across from the cathedral playing Galician bagpipes; the brilliant harpist, barely out of the wet under an arcade as night came softly down. I’d bought a tiny silver cross of Santiago for my mother in a shop, the cross that is also a sword. Being transported after death in a stone boat apparently not miracle enough, St. James is said to have—much later—cut down Moors right and left. As one guidebook points out, the dazzling altar’s enthusiastic commemoration of this, in that remote holy corner of Spain, had to be covered with bedsheets when Franco and his Moroccan troops came to pray for victory in the Civil War.
As usual, I’d become an ageist snob. Why would anyone in possession of Master Mateo’s original Portico de la Gloria slap a Baroque façade over it? Sixteenth-, eighteenth-century artifacts? Please—show me more twelfth-century stuff. Of course, in Oviedo that would be upended by the ninth-century Cámara Santa, the original pre-Romanesque chapel within the Gothic cathedral. All those long ages; all that stolen Mexican, South American, silver and gold, inevitably teasing out reflections on permanence, layering, transformation. What endured? What changed?
I’d finally settled on a tiny hole-in-the-wall, shyly asking the old man behind the counter about the empañada, then deciding on the mussels. I’d taken a low stool at a minuscule table, facing out the open door. Behind me, a family celebrating some special occasion had joked with the owners. The proprietor had brought me a tiny tapa plate of cheese and small slices of empañada. Oh, no. Had I not made it clear, after all? My Spanish was very rusty, and I speak zero Gallego, but I’d thought we’d communicated. Whatever. It would do; I wasn’t that hungry.
Somewhere up the street a violin had begun to play in the night rain. Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons had reverberated off stone walls and pavement, swelling to fill the narrow passage with almost unbearable beauty. I’d waited, hardly believing this was street music, but still it had soared through every intricacy, exquisite as the harp earlier. Football fans surging, raucous, out of bars as a match against Real Barcelona ended had been bathed in the glowing waves of music as truly as in the rain itself. No: it was that their noise had become yet another part of the music for a while, there in the street, something Vivaldi would have added if he’d heard it.
The owner’s wife had brought me the plate of mussels. They’d thrown in the appetizer. When I’d paid and started to leave, her husband had taken my hand as she beamed beside him. “Usted es muy amable,” I’d managed: you are very kind.
Tuesday morning in Oviedo it was back to the phone and the Internet: buying a train ticket on from León (where I wouldn’t be staying, after all) to Madrid, changing the hotel reservation in Madrid, talking to the travel insurance company representative, who set about trying to get me on an earlier flight, emailing my kids, brothers, cousin, and neighbor. But out from some lost place came a very long-forgotten image, of my mother teaching me to tie my shoes.
We had been very close—and not. We had not seen eye to eye on many things. My delayed “separation-individuation,” in adolescent development jargon, a source of regret and resentment for me, had come still too soon for her. But all that day images such as those shoelaces would well up as I sat, first on the bus, then the train, and I would dig for tissues and look away out the window, as mountains gave way again to the plain of Castile, and finally to darkness. The little bunch of warm grapes with my sandwich for a summer day-camp picnic. Her shushing our car full of junior-high girls, the principal approaching, as the F.H.A. prepared to set out to a movie: “I want to get this from the horse’s mouth”—which sent us, of course, into far greater giggles. Future Homemakers: that had been our intended destiny.
Still, through the long day the drama at home, however present inside me, seemed hazy by its very remoteness, a story, that probably would turn out to be a false alarm. It also began to seem the train would never reach Madrid, but go on passing through dusty towns forever, stopping for a minute or two at the larger ones. They were concrete; they were real. In the absence of a visit, I had to wonder about their stories, too, the lives within the ubiquitous stone walls—however modest, however neglected; in sight of the stronger fortifications on hills behind some. Nothing of the magnificence of Ávila, with its eighty-eight towers, but every one had, long ago, attempted to prepare some sort of defense to exist at all. Was it that in the States we do not carry our history constantly on our backs, like turtles, that made this notable? Or that our walls are invisible?
The priest didn’t get it quite right, extrapolating from her passing from one historic church of the Immaculate Conception, where she was baptized, to another. In between she had married a Methodist. There’d been no Mass then; in fact, in the Thirties, a ceremony in the rectory was all they’d been allowed. Almost sixty-eight years ago, that was, and the marriage had lasted fifty-eight. Then, at graveside, he tried to hand the crucifix to our middle brother and his wife. They directed him to me, and rather than protest right there, I simply thanked him. Afterward I pointed out to my brother that they were the only practicing Catholics left in the family, that they shouldn’t be giving it to the pagan. “But I think the two of you were the closest,” he said.
I came, finally, to her bedside, with three hours’ sleep, up for twenty-six, having left my narrow Mexican silver bracelet behind at Barajas airport security. I pried the little sword cross out of its tightly-wrapped paper in my purse and held it close so she could see it, telling her what it was. I slid my hand under the covers to take hers. And the next day, stroking those knotted hands, smoothing her hair, I kept telling her I—we—loved her till tears stopped me, as the nurse listened for the last beat of her heart.
I called my children back. With my daughter I had to pause to recover my voice, to get past tears. They made it in, in the wee hours Saturday morning.
Sunday, about to leave for lunch with the rest of the family, before the wake—the “visitation”—that evening, I put on clear nail polish. I wear even that so seldom these days, begrudging the time, and besides, my hands have done too much yard work and are looking knobby and scarred. Then I realized I hadn’t put on my shoes yet (between the jet lag and the sleep deprivation, it was something of a miracle I was functioning at all). Athletic shoes, with laces.
I called my daughter. “Could you please do me a huge favor?”
“What?”
“Would you help me put on my shoes?” I explained what I’d done. She and her brother laughed at me—I hadn’t failed to notice how uncharacteristically gentle they were being with me—and then she knelt and tied my shoes, double-looping the laces to take up slack, neatly tucking in the ends.
(originally written in 2005; cross-posted to the blog Parisienne d'un mois )
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