Driving Away 2023

My mother was dying. Or so we thought. With hospice on call, she still lived with relative independence in a retirement community. She and my father moved in when she was still in her 60s, he in his 70s, just as Parkinson’s made it difficult for him to walk. Twenty years of new friends and dining hall meals and deaths. 

Her hospice nurse checked in regularly. Each of us, her four daughters, did as well. Access to her oxygen was all she needed. And ice cream. And our attention. She was determined to live. I wondered what she wanted from life now. She was not one to talk about such things.

From what I could tell, gardening was the only old love she managed from her apartment. She gave up her garden plot with blueberries, irises and zinnias but could keep plants alive on her porch. The golf clubs and her tennis racket lived in the trunk of her car as memories. She no longer drove but could visit the car. Her days were spent writing notes, making lists, reading old letters, filling zip lock bags with photographs she thought each of us might want.

My sisters managed her finances, medical needs, communications with the retirement complex. I considered my job to be social. We used to swim together but no longer. I could take her shopping and to her favorite fast-food joints, only to find her unable to eat or cover the distance from a handicapped parking space to her desires in a store. New clothes would arrive from catalogues.

One day she asked me to drive her back to her hometown, to revisit old haunts one last time. Always up for a road trip, I thought this would be fun for me as well. Maybe we would talk on the long car ride. We made a date. I made hotel reservations. Hospice gave me instructions on her medications and how to handle the oxygen tanks. Then the nurse said, “It is illegal to transport a dead body across state lines. This is what you need to do if she dies while you are together.”

Then, my mother and I drove away.