Strongheart: My Mom, Tenderheartedness, and Holding Gratitude and Grief

Deep gratitude to my mother's incredibly sweet, compassionate, and loving caregivers for these photographs and for all the ways that they keep my mama and me connected.

My mom, April 19th, 2020

Mom's caregiver asked my mama to smile for Molly just before her afternoon nap, April 22nd

Facetiming with my mom at wake-up for last of her daily pills. Pictures above are of my mother, twin brother, and myself in the mid-1950's.

My mom and I exchange big smiles when saying goodnight, April 22nd

My 93 year old mother was able to open her eyes and motion her hand under her blanket to wave hello when I recently arrived for a window visit. Even just the slight movement of her hand in an effort to return my wave touches my heart. The smallest things are often the biggest treasures.

Every day, and as Francis Weller frames it, I am stretched large by holding grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. The grief comes in waves as I watch Alzheimer's claim more and more of my mother. Every week there is more slipping away. And my heart hurts with not being able to touch and kiss and hug my mom. I yearn to be in her room with her, holding her hand, speaking softly into her ear, and simply being together no matter if she is awake or asleep.

My heart also holds gratitude for so much — including all the different ways that my mother's caregivers and I are working together with this new normal. They facilitate our window and our Facetime visits, they send me photos of my mom during her day, and also photos and videos of our window visits. And, most recently, I've been able to Facetime with my mom when she's awakened to receive her last pills of the day and say goodnight. These are such tender moments.

My heart also swells with gratitude for these past nearly seven years since we were able to first bring my mother home to her family here in the Pacific Northwest in May 2013. While there were many bumpy, painful times in the beginning, none of that compares with the joy, the miracles, and the endless treasured moments that we have shared together over these past years. The pictures below are but a tiny glimpse.

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Reflections also come to me of both the enormity of the losses that my mother and I have experienced in our lifetimes, and the enormity of the healing, growth, and transformations that my mom and I have experienced together over these past years.

When we first arrived here from Michigan at the end of May 2013, my mother's untreated mental illness triggered a deep dive into the clutches of the darkness, trauma, and terror which had consumed her throughout her adult like. Now, here she was finally home to her family and instead of celebration, it was like a tsunami rolled in and completely overtook her. My mom tried to slit her wrists again, screamed that she hated me and wanted go back to Michigan, spent her 87th birthday on a psychiatric ward, and was obsessed with the relentless narrative that she wanted to die. The psychiatrist at the hospital just blocks from our home where my mother spent over two weeks told us that she would need to be on strong doses of medication, including antipsychotics which could shorten her life, but that the alternative would likely be institutionalization. We agreed to follow this advice and to do everything possible to avoid my mom being institutionalized.

And now, seven years later and at nearly 94, my mom is still here. And for a long, long time I was able to serve as something similar to a midwife to my mother, helping her to shed what needed to die — the torment of her lifelong narcissistic narratives, projections, image management, and shutting out love — so that there could be this birthing of something new.

We would sit out on our patio and my mama would replay for me scenes which had haunted her forever and which I'm certain she had never given voice to before with this kind of depth. She spoke of her father, who's motto was "tell her once or give her a lickin'." And over and over Mom would talk about her mother lying out in the sunroom with a washrag over her forehead and clearly not available to little Nancy. My mama was abandoned on some deep level by her parents, who did the best that they could, but who also were simply unable to be there for the child my mother once was in the ways that she most needed.

And this was the fertile ground out of which my mother's mental illness took hold. She had to pretend to not need what she needed, not see what she saw, not feel what she felt, not be who she was.

Until we would sit together, beginning when my mom was 87, in a space I had created in my heart and in our home of safety where finally, finally, my mother could come out of hiding. She didn't have to pretend anymore. She would speak about her parents and how she wanted to die and how she was just "trouble" and all the ways that she had felt deeply flawed and unworthy of love.

And my heart was able to hold all of this. There was no fixing. No telling her that she shouldn't feel that way, no shoulding at all. And every time that Mom would say that she's just trouble, I'd offer a different narrative — that she was treasured, that I treasure every moment together, that no matter what she is feeling or thinking, it's all okay, all held with tenderness, compassion, and love.

Eventually, the talk of wanting to die ended. In time, there was no more talk of being "trouble." And the need to pretend that she was someone other than who and where she was at slipped away. And we began gazing into one another's eyes with deep love. This was a mutual gazing into one another's heart and soul that had never been able to happen before. Until now.

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Today, nearly all else has slipped away. Except love. Love is what remains. And love is what will continue. Out of so much brokenness has come the unbroken. There are no words for my gratitude....

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.