SEARCHING FOR WORDS

As I join my friends for our monthly luncheon, I hear one of them say:
“I got a call from the hospital. She had climbed up on the stove to reach the top of the kitchen cabinet.” - I picture her little granddaughter out cold on the floor.
“Poor kid. Did she break anything?” I want to know.
“I am talking about my mother!”
Yes. Mothers. The inexhaustible topic of retirement-age daughters. Once upon a time we talked about how to change the world -- or at least the men in our lives -- about our children and, of course, our jobs, and how to manage a plate much too full. Nowadays, with the children raised and retirement around the corner, our plate is nonetheless still far from empty. It is filled with our responsibilities towards the women who raised us, fed us and now need us. Most of our fathers have died, but many mothers in their eighties, nineties are still alive and, some of them, kicking.
My friend Carol visits her mother every other day: “At least I try to, but often she has left the key in the door to be safe from intruders. She is too deaf to hear the bell, but refuses to wear her hearing aid. Later she calls me: Honey, I waited for you by the window all afternoon.”
“At least you can just drop by, Carol. With me it’s all or nothing.”

Having immigrated to Canada as a young woman, I now visit my mother in Germany twice a year for a few weeks. The rest of the year I phone her every day at six-thirty a.m. my time, twelve-thirty her time. Or better: I try to. With the cordless stuck between ear and shoulder, I prepare my lunch. I let the phone ring until it goes on strike. A few minutes later, already in my coat, I try again. Sometimes I luck out.
She is out of breath: I ran to the real phone,” she says, meaning the old black rotary in my father’s former study. She doesn’t believe in using that silly blue cordless thing ringing right next to her chair in front of the TV.
“How are you?” I ask. My lips mouth the answer; it’s the same every time:
“How should I be? Could be better, could be worse. Occasionally she tells me of yet another acquaintance that has passed away: She was at least ten years younger than I,” she adds, strangely animated.
Another time she says she can’t talk because a nice young man in her apartment has plans for her.
“What young man? I want to speak to him!” She calls him to the phone.
“Young man!” It’s her caregiver who comes twice a week to give her a bath:
“He lets me stay in the bath a lot longer than that other one, that bossy woman.”
There are more and more days when I can’t reach her. She removes her hearing aid as soon as her daily help has left. I go to work, hoping either her TV is just too loud or she is out with one of her loyal friends. Yet I can’t help worrying that she may be lying on the kitchen floor out cold. My mother has severe osteoporosis. Once, after a bad fall, she crawled to the phone when I called. I felt helpless but managed to call the ambulance in her city, Duesseldorf. The dispatcher’s befuddled first response: “You are calling from Canada? Don’t you have any ambulances over there?”
My brothers and I got her one of those emergency buttons, a functional pendant. She calls it her medal and only wears it when she has company or wants to indulge us. I ask her over the phone and insist I wait on the line until she has put on her medal.
Order obeyed, mission accomplished, she announces a few minutes later. I imagine her facial expression, impish and defiant just like that of my three year old granddaughter trying to get out of trouble. There are various similarities between the ninety-three and the three year old. Once, my son and I spied through the half-open kitchen door. We watched the two of them stuffing their mouths with sugar cubes, grinning at each other and casting furtive glances towards the door.
Home fried potatoes, bread with extra-fine liverwurst, chocolate and sugar cubes: These are my mother’s staple foods nowadays. As kids we weren’t allowed dessert until we had finished our veggies.
“I am 93,” she challenges us, when we worry about her eating habits. More troubling is her refusal to drink liquids. A cup of coffee in the morning, that’s it. Occasionally, she wets her lips on a little mineral water. Thinking of how much she loves to tend her geraniums on the balcony, I tell her,
“Your brain--like a flowerbed-- needs water; you will remember things better if you drink more.” She smiles.
As long as she has company, my mother still enjoys life. She, who used to relish solitude, now suffers from loneliness. She used to read for hours on end. Last year during one of my visits, she put down Die Frankfurter, the sophisticated daily paper she had been subscribing to as long as I can remember.
“I must ask them to change back to their old style. I can’t understand a word. Could you write that letter for me? My wrist hurts.”
“It’s not their style; it’s your ... bad memory,” I say searching for words, gentle yet honest.
She looks me straight in the face.
“Please cancel the subscription. I know my mind is flying away from me.” How I wish I could chase after this sharp, inquisitive mind and return it to its rightful owner, my mother, a woman who was proud of her intellect at a time when intellectual prowess in a woman was scorned in Germany.
With increasing senility she has become gentler. How appreciative she is of kindness done to her. She showers her caretakers with chocolates. She also can enjoy little things a lot more than she used to and gets excited over a penguin with a bow tie in a shop window, a tacky plastic thing she would have scorned in the past. Kitsch. In the spring we go and look at all the Easter bunnies; she tells me my father used to call her ‘rabbit’. Of course, I know. Gone are the days she listened to classical music only. At my last visit we danced to pop music in the kitchen.
Mostly agreeable, she is adamant, however, about staying in her apartment surrounded by her art and her books, even if she can’t read them any more.
“If you think a nursing home is so great, why don’t you go and live there yourself!”
She loves an outing to the Altstadt, the old part of town. This requires preparation. I comb her hair; she hands me the various pins. I still can’t do her hair as well as my father. We choose the proper outfit, comfortable yet classy, and matching jewelry. Already in her coat, she realizes she is wearing brown shoes over grey pantyhose. No way.
Finally downtown, she stops by a lingerie shop. I tease her: Do you want the red lacy panties for your birthday? She winks and giggles. At her favourite cafe she orders a piece of Black Forest cake. If we are lucky, there are noisy kids at a neighbouring table. She waves to them while other guests in the restaurant look peeved.
“The children think I am one of them because I am so small. And doesn’t this little girl look exactly like my oldest great-grand daughter? Oh dear, what’s her name again?” Sometimes in the park I push her on a swing. Then we sit on a bench and she leans her head against me. I recall her words from my childhood: ‘Your father is better at cuddling. I never learned it as a child because I had no mother.’
“We are a good mother- daughter team,” I whisper in her ear.
“Mother, daughter,” she responds and cuddles some more.
Often she is searching for words. Recently we saw a young soldier.
“This ... war man had better know what he is getting into.”
“German soldiers nowadays are peacekeepers; I wish Onkel Martin could have been a peacekeeper.” She nods. Her only brother went missing in action in ’44 on the Russian front. Years later, as a small child, I waited for him, sitting on the curb for an hour every day. My mother never told me there was no point in waiting.
At home she spends hours in front of the idiot box. These dumb old cooking shows, she complains when she turns on the TV in the late morning. We were the last family on the block to get a TV. I was seventeen. We were only allowed to watch the evening news and the occasional good movie. Now we watch a “Krimi”, a crime show, together almost every night. She points at the detective towards the end:
“Is he the bad guy?” What can I say?
At 87, she still gave presentations at her Women’s Literary Circle, her last a lecture on The Road as Metaphor in Literature. I miss my old mother. Often nowadays she sits there with this I-am-not-at-home expression in her face. Where has she gone to? What has happened to our vivid discussions, our arguments?
Last year, my daughter and I visited her in Germany arriving from opposite sides of the world. We were sitting in the living room, talking. My mother watched us, content, not interrupting every sentence as she had done during our last joint visit. At one point, my daughter said: Mom, I would love you to read some of your favourite German poems but slowly, please. I located my mother’s big poetry anthology and began reading. Suddenly my mother’s voice, joining in:
The leaves are falling,
Falling from afar,
As if gardens were wilting in the heavens ...
My daughter’s eyes widened, I continued reading, accompanied by my mother’s voice.
“Omi, you still know the poem by heart!” my daughter exclaimed. Omi nodded happily. We read for hours.
Now I recite poetry with my mother whenever I get a chance. These are the good times. But when I am about to go out with some friends, and she asks for the ninety-ninth time: “So, where are you going tonight?, and: You are coming back at ...?” I can feel my patience fly out the window.
“I have told you many times already!”
“But I forget. Tell me again.” I do and then lock myself in the bathroom. Oh gosh, I used to do this twenty years ago when the kids were driving me nuts. She knocks at the bathroom door: “And you are coming back at?” I swear, if and when I feel my mind flying away, I will lie down on frozen Lake Ontario one night and wake up dead. When I am composed enough to leave the bathroom, I kiss her good-bye and tell her one last time I will be home at midnight. She smiles at me: “Midnight is okay, I am a night owl. I can wait that long. But don’t be late and don’t get in trouble. You know I always worry. You are such a handful. Make sure you take a taxi home. And you are coming home at ...?” She waves from the window as usual. I wave back.
“See you in a few hours,” I shout. It’s a lot easier than having to say: See you in six months.
Old people often live in the past; less so my mother. Orphaned as a young girl, she learned early to focus on the road ahead. She had to cut herself a path through the jungle of life. A teacher told the ten year old girl at the village school she had the brains to go to an academic institution in town; he would try to arrange a scholarship. She went to his desk every day until she had her stipend. My mother went on to law school, graduated at the head of class, but as a woman wasn’t allowed the award. She wanted to become a judge in Juvenile Court, but again, wasn’t allowed; Hitler did not tolerate women in robes. She kept a Jewish couple in her apartment until they could flee. After the war she represented the Female Social Workers’ Union, fought all the way to the Supreme Court and achieved pay equity. Does she remember any of this?
She does enjoy looking at old photo albums. Family holidays by the North Sea or in Italy when we were children. The later albums of my parents traveling through Europe, their visits with the grandchildren, their visits to Canada. How especially my father loved cottage life. She laughs when she sees the unlikely picture of him drinking beer from the bottle.
Later, a photo of her at the Calgary Stampede a year after my father’s death. ‘I want to travel where I never went with your father,’ she had requested and we took the train West.
She points at the photo of a young cowboy on a bucking bull.
“Doesn’t that hurt ... his thing?” She asks me. I play mean:
“What thing?”
“Come on, you know, his thing down there.”
I assure her it’s well protected. We had had the exact same conversation at the Stampede.
Out of the blue, she asked me a year ago, what I would do differently in life. All I could think of on the spot was: “I would have taken French at school rather than ancient Greek. Would have served me better in Canada.” She frowned.
“What would you have done differently?”
“Your father enjoyed concerts, and I enjoyed theatre. We almost always went to the theatre.” - I doubt she would be capable of such an insight now.
Yet on our final walk during my most recent visit, she suddenly said, as we left the grocery store: “I so like it when you or your brothers or any of the grandchildren come. But one has to depend on oneself. One can’t expect other people to solve one’s problem. Complaining gets you nowhere.” She spoke fluently, did not search for a single word. Suddenly my old mother was back if only for a fleeting moment: “I am a tough old bird,” she added, putting her right arm through mine, while her little shopping bag was dangling from her left, filled with 100 grams of extra-fine liverwurst, a box of sugar cubes and a chocolate bar. I knew better than to ask her to let me carry it.