For whatever their reason, most people don’t stick around. And financial strain usually means downsizing—sometimes radically and often very quickly. The need for more care leads you to assisted living or a nursing home. The demands of the illness or of cancer simply take their toll, day after day after day. And no one can understand just how deeply that goes unless they have gone through it.
You all know this. We’re part of the same tribe. For some of you, I’m sure it’s harder. For others of you, it may be easier. But we’re all marked in some way by the journey. We’re scarred.
My mom’s face appeared in a dream memory. She looked up at me from her hospital bed, a bit pleadingly, on edge, her blue eyes sharp, tender, cutting, demanding—all at the same time:
Don’t abandon me, she said.
I won’t. I won’t, I answered, almost more out of fear and shock than a full-hearted commitment. It was something I knew, like a key I gripped so hard it nearly broke skin.
But in the same moment, the room had condensed down into a shadowed, oblong clay tube—she on one end, I on the other. I felt so close to her yet distanced, her words echoing—a barrier, yet this intimate connection. Of course I would be here. She didn’t need to say this—to have such doubts. But then, her request, her fear, her demand seemed to come from a much deeper place than that moment we were in, touching the coiled, sandy grit on our private rims of that passageway. How did we come to this? Just us, here?
Her relief. And then she leaned back—all of the drive, for the moment, having left her. It was as if her skin itself were a soft blanket that now rested. I swirl back into another dream sequence, the pain and sting—the beauty of that commitment, the fear, the drive, the desperation, the ease, the sheer raw love, but also, icy rain pellets, leaves stuck to skin, the wind slamming—a tornado-like spinning spinning… and then I awaken, alone in bed, clenching this fuzzy purple blanket. Sweat on my belly, sticking.
Who is with me?
I am illuminated by a slice of moonlight. Dream memories such as this one are like broken lengths of glass reflecting. They lie scattered on my sleeping bag. I could cut skin if I move too quickly. I wait.
The noise coming from my mouth into this silence like an owl’s call rising up out of the black density of night, nothing coming in return. I wait.
Is this it? Did I go too far? Am I the only one here? Did I give too much? Are my scars too thick to feel through?
The carousel starts moving. I’m riding the Saint Bernard. Then the music begins, and I am suddenly weeping. My solid-backed companion guides me, navigates, revives me with elixir from his barrel. When the Saints go marching in. My mother and I sing. We sing. We’re dancing. When our leaders learn to cry./Oh Lord I want to be in that number,/When the saints go marching in.
And we’re in the kitchen. And we’re in the car. And we're in the hospital. And, we’re in that number. She’s simply on another animal ahead of me. The wooden floor holds us—circling along with us underneath. The Wurlitzer spins. We spin. Time spins. The fox above looks on, its tail alight and flashing. The world whirls. This world, the next world, the one we came from before this one—they all spin, and we are in this dance together—all moving, all listening to the same music but different songs. And my friend burt is there, running the carousel. It’s magic. This place is powerful. When it hits you, it really hits you, he says.
I am not alone, not alone. The owl answered back.