Still Listening

That feeling when you come to the end of an extraordinary book and you don’t want to move. Your eyes finish the last words and you just continue to stare at the empty place on the page. And even as you close the book, there is a stillness. You lift your gaze somewhere far away, and at some point realize that you’re still breathing and there’s an open book on your lap. You become slowly aware of the necessity that you will, indeed, need to move on with your day… but you don’t move just yet. Even if you know there are things to do or an appointment to get to, you feel this strange suspension of time.

Or the final note of the final piece of a concert that has utterly transformed you. Your ears strain to stay connected to the sound, even as you see the effort in making it, stop. Your whole body stays perched on the experience of tracing the sound, listening until it recedes to silence…and you’re still listening. An entire audience suspended and the performers too: maybe a bow pendant in midair, a microphone held at arm’s length from lips that slowly close, a conductor’s arms frozen in an exalted expression. That collective sensation of held breath. That in-between, before moving on.

This is the liminal space I have tried to preserve since my mom died a week ago.

Yesterday would have been her 82nd birthday. I thought maybe I could write something then, but I still felt spellbound. Numb, attuned, listening. Not wanting that particular solitude, silence, and sense of connection to break.

Of course, eventually there is the first drawing of a singular pair of hands together in applause. Offered slowly, so you can hear the space in between. And then more hands join, and everyone begins to breathe and shift back in their seats and look at their neighbor to reconnect as the clapping showers down.

I’m feeling a bit of that energy shift today.

My mom was abundant in care and love, and also knew how to lean into the joy of life. As a young girl she put olives on her fingers and ate them off one by one. She loved playing outside and was the kind of kid who put worms in her pockets. She and her best friend Jen have many stories about getting in trouble for being unable to stop giggling. This was verified by my own experience: whenever they got together, I remember hearing them laugh long past my bedtime.

Mom loved New York City. She worked there after college, made some of her closest friendships there, met my dad there, and gave birth to her first child (me!). She loved to travel, too- first as a young adult exploring the world with friends, and later as a mother, when she poured that same enthusiasm into planning some really incredible family vacations. She was someone who leaned into life- curious, engaged, ready to explore, make a plan, make something happen.

And she was the kind of mom who sang to us as children before bed and watched The Sound of Music with me on repeat in the middle of the night on many occasions during what we later figured out were asthma attacks. Two French braids with perfect bows for kindergarten. Home-sewn Halloween costumes. Roll-out cookies at Christmas. Special birthday parties. When I decided to become vegetarian in middle school, she started finding new recipes and figuring it out with me.

She allowed me to trust myself because I felt her trust in me—to pursue my interests and passions, make mistakes and figure things out, love deeply and live fully.

I learned about love by watching her give it. She cared for her own parents as they aged, and then became the primary caregiver to my father at home as he declined through dementia, until his passing in 2009. She showed up for the people she loved when love was joy and work, tenderness and patience, uncertainty and repetition, connection and loss. It was all wrapped up together, all the time.

And she trusted me in 2017 when I asked her to move from Connecticut to live with me and my kids in New Jersey. 

Our lives became intimately woven into the day-to-day: post-dinner dance parties in pajamas, games of Uno, school performances, music-making, Saturday pancakes, the pandemic, walks around the neighborhood, ordinary Tuesdays. These past nine years of my life she was with me in it all– from my kids in elementary school losing baby teeth through to their teenage years and getting their braces off. I went back to graduate school and celebrated graduating with her, even as the dementia progressed to the point where she couldn’t remember that I was in school, what I was studying, or where. 

And as her dementia progressed, we shifted with it. She had to give up driving. The confusion increased. She needed more help with more things. There were endless Post-its back and forth until she couldn’t write anymore: where I was going and when we’d eat dinner; she would leave me notes saying “these cookies are VERY GOOD” or “Lynne went for a walk 10:42am.” More recently, she needed help bathing, and I would blow-dry her hair—the sound and smell of the hair dryer strangely bringing me back to when she had done the same for me.

This chapter of parenting my kids while accompanying my mom through the last chapter of her life was one I took on with a fully open heart, and one of the most profound experiences of my life. I got to feel love move through me every day… to feel it embodied in patience, commitment, care, giving and letting go. It is both brutal and beautiful to help your mother through the end of life just as she helped you at the beginning.

My mom taught me how to love by loving me. By showing up. By giving. By laughing. By letting go. By staying connected to the good stuff even when life was hard.

They say grief is love without a place for it to go, and I feel that in so many ways.

I know this music has ended. I can feel the applause beginning to rain down around me. I know that soon we will all get up and leave these seats and get on with things, carrying whatever has changed in us from having been here. But right now, I’m still sitting here… acutely aware of what feels like both silence and sound.