My first whole image of my mother: my just-older sister Marti and I sit on our knees on the window seat at the front of our “nursery school” on the high end of C Street.  Our teacher, a thick-shouldered woman with a European accent, has set us there to watch for our “mama,” and here she comes, walking slender and composed up the hill: knee-length white dress, white hose, white shoes.  A stiff white cap with a black stripe pinned to her dark brown hair.

We wave madly. We fog the plate glass.  Our mother sees us at the window and smiles, happy to spot her little girls.  Then, as now, she is amazed that she is an object of love.  The teacher holds us back until our mama reaches the stoop, then releases us to run into her arms.

My memory fades there, but I know we trekked on up the flatiron slope, a maternal hand for each of us, home to the basement apartment above the blue-green desert city.

Our dad went to work too, but what he did there was unimaginable.  He came home to kiss our mother.  He threw us high and caught us.  He’d put one of us in the rattletrap kid-seat strapped to his ten-speed to ride the steep pitches of the Avenues.  Dad was either not here or he filled the atmosphere.  But I knew that when our mother was gone, she was a nurse.  She made sick people in white beds in clean rooms in long hallways get better. 

One day after work she told us about delivering a baby, following through with placenta, cord, and clean-up all by herself in the delivery room, because it just came before the doctor managed to arrive and wash his hands.  She said she was fine, knew exactly what to do, but when the shift was over she had a shaky little breakdown in the parking lot. 

Before she was married, she’d worked with the Red Cross, traveling in the Bloodmobile from rural town to town.  In that circle she was notorious for her aim—she could find a vein and enter it when no one else could.  Also she once rebuffed a man who hung around after giving blood: he was waiting to tell her she had the most beautiful breasts he’d ever seen under a uniform.  I don’t think he said “breasts.”

Once, as she walked toward the hospital doors, she thought an enormous bird was flying overhead, but she looked up to see a grown man falling through the air.  He’d jumped from a high hospital floor—my mother’s arrival was coincidental.  But I believed this was the sort of thing my mother did in general: run toward people who dropped from the sky.

It was kind of true.  She had a way of being at the perimeter of disaster, as if she attracted it.

She may believe so too, somewhere in the vault she won’t—can’t—open.  It started young.  Her mother died, dead winter night in their Idaho farmhouse, heart failure at thirty-three.  Mom doesn’t remember her but recalls her father sitting at her bedside, pre-dawn, bearing the news.  Mom was four.  Her sister was eight.  “Daddy” said he was going downstairs to call Mr. Kiser, the undertaker, and then she understood he wasn’t teasing.

When she was sixteen she fell in love with the high school Apollo.  His name was Keith, which sounded to me like teeth.  She’d taken some abuse from local mean girls, so she was amazed that he loved her back.  He proposed, gave her a ring.  Her father and stepmother weren’t as thrilled as she’d anticipated.  He came from a good family.  An upright boy.  Girls her age got married all the time.  But her parents told her to go to college for a year.  She was about to turn seventeen and had skipped a grade, way back, so graduation was near.  She was a good student, a good daughter.  She obeyed her parents and returned the ring. 

Next October she rode the bus home from college classes, thirty miles.  She was eager to dress up for a date with her guy.  She stepped off the northbound bus with her younger sister, crossed the train tracks on foot a hundred yards from their new home below town.  Mom saw Keith’s car coming south, stopped to wait.  Somehow no one saw the train, right there.  It was just getting dark, light swirling snow.  Aunt Karleen says the train’s lights should have reflected on the steel rails, but it came from the Underworld: no lights, no horn.

The boy turned at the tracks.  The train slammed into his car.  Mom ran to him, half- ejected from the shattered window.  His neck was broken and she wrapped her coat around him as he died.  Our mom told us this story when we ran our hands over a pieced lap blanket draped over the back of our sofa: squares of burnt-orange felted wool.  Pieces of the coat that comforted the dying boy in the smashed car.  Her stepmother had cleaned and crocheted them together as a keepsake. 

When she was heavily pregnant with Marti (the first of us), Mom was walking across State Street in Salt Lake City, two steps behind an older man dressed in a suit and nice shoes.  A car ran the light, hit the old guy, missed Mom’s extended stomach by a few inches.  Mom watched in slow motion as he flew up, face to the sky.  His glasses dropped at her feet and shattered.  And then the man came down, she said, with “a sickening thud.”

I could go on with this; my childhood was street-lit by other people’s disasters.  My parents settled, three more siblings beyond Marti and me, in a small Utah town fifteen miles of no-shoulder roads from a hospital.  Doesn’t seem that far until a kid spurts blood from the head after falling off a horse, or a jagged tibia sticks out of a sloshing irrigation boot, or a baby comes too quick in the house across the street.  Or a middle-aged father of six is gasping through a deep-night cardiac arrest.  People in our town knew the first thing, before calling an ambulance or piling a bloody mess into the car for a drive to the hospital, was to call Nadeene Anderson.

…

For all the blood, the only time I saw my mother saturated in it was the Sunday she backed the station wagon into, and almost over, my two-year-old sister Teri.  It was the first time I saw my mother descend into paralysis, like other people did, in the face of horror.

Where we lived, everyone went to church together.  Neighborhoods belonged to the same congregation, attended meetings at the same time.  Walking home from church with the girls my age—fifteen—was a way to free-wheel an extra hour of a waning weekend.  Halfway home on long, narrow Grove Drive, my friend-enemy Melinda said, “Is that your Mom and Dad?” just before I saw our brown Ford station wagon coming back from driving the rest of my family home.  I saw my dad honking the horn, scattering cars and people as he sped past.

Incapable of discerning between a gag and a crisis, I waved as my parents blazed by. I laughed it off, maybe nervous, until our neighbors, following more slowly, stopped to address me. Sister Seeley said, “It looked like something happened to your little sister.  Do you want to go to the hospital with us?”

I got in, stunned, and was more shocked when I saw the station wagon in the Emergency drive-up.  My father stood in the corridor, pale.  He said, “Come sit with your mother.”  I dissolved when I saw her, cowering in a dark sitting room, her gauzy dress soaked in blood at the cream-colored bodice, spreading down to muddle the floral skirting.

In a weird way now this is just a run-of-the-mill five-kid family story of losing track of a toddler at the wrong moment: everyone thought someone else had seen her in.  Teri wandered around to the back of the car.

Mom backed out for yet another church meeting, and the bumper knocked the baby to the ground, a bad thump to the head—still gives Teri a look of gazing in different directions.  The chassis went over clean but then the turn of the front tire scraped her face along the concrete until my father came out, shouting as he ran.  Mom hit the brake,  Dad picked up the bleeding child, held her as bait to make Mom move to the passenger side.  She held tiny Teri, barely conscious, as Dad rushed them to the hospital.

A story like this acquires many renditions, and we’ve all spun it in the decades after our little sister recovered.  But I don’t think Mom did.  Recover, I mean.  I think it was the first irreversible crack in the stone.  Dad cuffed it off on the other side with, “It’s hard to kill a kid,” but Mom never found a way to speak of it. 

We’ve come to understand that there’s a lot she will never speak, never release.  Her mouth tightens into a lipless line, compressed at the corners.  Primal, livid smoke behind the eyes.  Fierce and strange as her people are, I’ve never seen this in anyone else—no one related to her, no one raised with her, no one who emerged from her. 

It's not just awful stuff like almost killing her toddler daughter.  She presents the same livid blankness when her fine hair grows too long and “clings to her neck.”  When she used to reach to brush my ragged teenage hair out of my eyes, restraining herself, I think, from slapping my cheek.  When we folded towels the wrong way.  She cloaks when we smirk at her idyllic portrayals of our father, the fairytale man who rescued her from the bleakness of what she also, in dissociated stories, portrays as her happy, glorious Idaho origins.

…

She returned to hospital nursing the year I went to college—partly to keep her license from lapsing but probably also because I was expensive.  Marti was halfway through her two-year nursing degree.  I was a flighty maybe-art / maybe-French lit major . Dad was doing fairly well as a small-town real estate guy but the enterprise was always up and down—another story but it called on my mother’s talents for consistency.

She worked part time on the medical floor of the local hospital for less than a year before being recruited as Director of Nursing at a new long-term care center.  It pushed the final decades of her career into geriatric care, and Nadeene slayed as usual.  Wherever she took charge, state accreditors ranked her work as the best in the state, again and again.  Like her house, my mother kept her institution spotless, efficient, calm.  Her staff, like her children, knew what she expected and found it inarguable.  She loved the residents in the pragmatic ways my mother loves—never sloppy, a little strict, undramatic.  Everyone showered, or got a thorough bath in bed, every day.  Everyone ate, at least a little bit.  Everyone got dressed, all the beds got made.  Everyone who could possibly get up, got up, at least for an hour, because it was good for them.

I don’t think she particularly liked being in charge of things.  She didn’t crave control over other people—not even her children.  She was generally reluctant to call us out, resented confrontation more than the inciting crime.

…

Her career kept arcing as my father’s disintegrated.  In their late fifties, our charismatic, gregarious Dad dipped into a years-long depression no one was allowed to notice.  It must have been garish for him and my mother.  He read Time and Sports Illustrated on the sofa in the open loft of their late-life foothill “dream house” while the TV blared ESPN.  Sometimes he’d buck up but mostly he was in the loft, TV so loud no one could speak over it.

Mom worked so long into her sixties I thought she’d never retire.  She must have been exhausted, and fearful, and I know she was simmering over her children’s religious defections.  The vulnerability made her more impenetrable.  She came home after work to make dinner for her husband, clean it up.  She went out to the yard with Dad to plant flowers, or pull weeds, or help with a little construction.  After a pipe broke and their basement flooded, they worked together to clean it up, repaint, get it ready for Teri and her husband to move into the apartment they made of it.  A lovely endeavor until Mom lost her footing on a stepladder, went down hard on the concrete floor, broke both arms at the elbow.  Teri moved in, wiped Mom’s butt in the bathroom until the casts came off.

…

Our mother just turned ninety.  We threw a big party for her at the condominium clubhouse.  Dad died twenty years ago; they had a sweet final season after she retired—sold their house, bought the rather murky tunnel of a condo and paid for it, no mortgage.  Took road trips to national parks, slept together in a pup tent on an inflated mattress.  Spent a year teaching medical and business English in China.  Went to Europe with Mom’s sisters and their husbands.

I picked them up from the airport when they returned from Europe.  Dad came down the escalator pale.  Disoriented. Mom, in a state of denial that rendered her unrecognizable, insisted it was just travel fatigue.  She had to know better, but the next day she drove him to Idaho for her class reunion, of all things.  He slept in the back seat both ways. Marti, who became the fierce RN she was taught to be, insisted against Mom’s addled protests that they meet her at the emergency room.

I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven Marti for that; maybe in some thread of magical thinking she believes that if the whole thing had remained unsaid it would have not become real.  The ER, where Marti had once worked for eleven years, transferred Dad to the veteran’s hospital in Salt Lake City for testing.

How it takes a full week to discover a melon-sized bleeding tumor in an unnaturally distended stomach, I don’t know, except protocol is test by test, elimination by elimination.  And, maybe because Nadeene, who acquired her clearest contours when disaster hovered like a leering corpse, who managed mortal and immortal crises step by step, was suddenly amoebic.

This isn’t the story of my father’s death. It’s a wincing glance at my mother’s living death twenty years beyond—another boundary fight as she clings to the diminishing phrases, anecdotes, and insistences that cloak her in being-ness.

…

She remembers her grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s names.  She recounts a rote repertoire of memories that make church people coo at her spunk and charm.  She knows her accounts and bills to the penny.  She calls to remind my sister and me of upcoming medical appointments, and she’s dressed and ready to go when we arrive to take her there.  Lucid. 

But there are eerie lapses.  Ten years ago Marti and her kids took Mom, eighty, to a Fourth of July fireworks show.  An older man a few family blankets over had a heart attack in the melee.  Medics arrived to administer CPR and prepare the man for transport.

Mom stood up like a sleepwalker and homed in, hovering unsteady over the medics, staring but saying nothing.  Marti ran to her, took her arm, eased her away before anyone had to shoo her off.  Mom followed, expressionless.  She sat down contritely but as soon as Marti turned her attention, Mom paddled right on over again.  Stood silent and entranced at the edge of the action, as if trying to recall something.  A medic told her to stand back, but Mom held position, transfixed, until Marti reached her again. 

…

Since then Mom has shattered both shoulders, one by tumbling backwards down her basement stairs because she insisted on carrying up a snowman jar.  Again by falling hard on the asphalt as she walked the short distance to retrieve her daily junk mail.  The falls were so brutal, the surgeries and recoveries so debilitating, I don’t know who but Nadeene could have bounced back.

The bones in her hips (one artificial) and in her spine are rubble.

The battle over her car keys nearly put me down for good.  I told her I was terrified that she’d crash into a car in another lane, or worse, hit a neighborhood child.  She said, “Well, sometimes terrible things just happen.  We can’t control everything, you know.”

Until just a few weeks ago she’s insisted on lurching along with her walker when we show up to do her shopping, or go to the drugstore, or to the many doctors (why she sees an ophthalmologist—two of them, in fact, when she’s almost completely blind, her irises silver as her hair, I do not know.  She won’t let us take her to the dentist to tighten her lower teeth).  But this month the pain has kept even her from clambering into the neighbors’ car for a ride to church, from coming along to “do her own shopping.”

After the second shoulder break, our brother Tom said, “Look, we’re all bigger than her.   We outnumber her five to one.”  We assembled at her house—Tony and Teri took long drives—to lay down the law.  She needed full-time access to medical care.  We were there for her, always would be, but we couldn’t attend every minute, night and day, trying to prevent the next fall, the next terrible accident, the next internet scam, the next social media fiasco.

Straight from the black hole: No.

She doesn’t want to spend our inheritance.  She “doesn’t want to be a burden.”  She just won’t drink very much water so she won’t need help getting to the bathroom on painful hips.  She has a nice supply of vanilla protein drinks, so she won’t need to wield a knife, or a can opener, or raise her stiffened arms too high to retrieve a plate that she won’t leave on the counter, or turn on the stove.  She gives herself a “sponge bath” every morning although it’s clear there are places she can’t reach, or forgets to.

She’s disintegrating in place, in her formerly spotless house she can’t see to clean.  Watching it is my personal definition of Hell.

…

Marti ordered a hospital bed for her, bendable in ways Mom perfectly understands and knows how to operate, complete with a bubbling vinyl pad to distribute pressure across the skin.  Handsome young men came in and set it up quick as a wink near the bedroom window.  Marti had a wheelchair brought in, and a commode that fits high over the low-slung toilet.

The commode: sure.  The bed: Mom won’t even look at it, won’t even deign to say no.  It just isn’t there.  She sits in her green armchair, gazing over the invisible bed toward the window.

She still prays out loud at bedtime: Please, dear Heavenly Father, help me to endure all that thou requirest of me so I may return to…

…

My mother is a high-def constellation of hyper-specific recollections.  Behind the bright stars: dense velvet black—not because she’s ninety but because she became herself, at four years old, by learning what to configure and what to shroud.  No memory beams forward from the event horizon, that winter night in 1939.  Whatever Nadeene was or might have become before her mother vanished is erased.  Here in her place is the child who shielded herself behind a tapestry of perfect compliance—good girl who did her chores, smart girl who skipped first grade in a one-room country school, resourceful girl who walked ten miles home along the darkening Yellowstone Highway in winter after a piano lesson, because she missed her ride and didn’t dare call her parents to come get her.

That child became our mother.  That child is gaining on our mother.  Not the one who must have acquired form before the morning her father called Mr. Kiser.

The child who is our mother is secretive and wily.  She plays us against one another.  She lies low, keeps a mild face.  We’ve each been taken down by it at one point or another, or another, but there are five of us, and we love her, and up to now we’ve been able to spell each other off.  Bring our separate kinds of best to her. 

A bedsore was not the breakthrough any of us wished for.  Mom knows what a bedsore is, and she understands the cause.  But she eats, sleeps, sits rapt for the next Masked Singer episode in that heinous green armchair, week after week, night and day, waiting for Dad to come shining through the window right there above the nice bendy hospital bed.

After seeing that nasty mess, Marti, the sibling who deserves the most validation from the mother she emulates, called me to say she needed a change of guard.  I drove down a few hours later.  Mom greeted me from her chair, blank and benign.  Didn’t say a word about the broken, festering flesh she was sitting on.  Didn’t yield a wince, a grimace, a tear.

…

But it’s ruptured something besides the skin. She’s fallen into a simpler, more contrite childlike state.  Last week we convened in her room, a couple of us sitting on the comfy hospital bed, to hear her wishes for resettling into assisted living.  For leaving her home.  She said, “Whatever you decide will be fine,” and then she gazed over our heads and breathed, light.

…

I’m convinced she’ll live forever, in incremental forms only she can inhabit.  That tight cable of self-protection, the defiant thread of vitality she spins like a spider is all I’ve ever known as Mother.  We’ll come together soon to help her move, and she’ll continue to drive us crazy and break our hearts.  But nurses will surround her.

We’ll make the little apartment look like her own house, with her own dishes and sofas, kitchen table and all the framed photographs of our father, of our father and her, our parents and us, enshrined.

Her own TV, pre-set on America’s Got Talent.

We’ll bring the monstrous green chair, because it’s hers.

…

Oh, wait. Never mind. She’s feeling much better! She’s not going anywhere.

No.

No.

…

This morning I drove the forty miles from my house to hers on ever-nasty I-15.  She needed me to drive a check to the bank, bring back the cash.  She wanted me to stop by WalMart, which I hate and she knows it, to buy a box of cheap apple fritters.  We go to her, errand or none.  We check on her.  We sit out the excruciatingly dull but dangerous hours, because we love her.

Mom was on the bathroom floor, leaning against the tub.  She’d fallen backwards trying to pull on a clean pair of pants.  Didn’t hit anything but carpeted floor but she couldn’t get back up.  She guessed she’d been down five minutes.

She’d already pushed her little emergency button, so I sat with her against the tub until the fire truck roared up.  Seven calendar-worthy EMTs jogged in.  She looked up at them, burly angels, nearly swooned as they picked her up—so gentle, so powerful, so handsome (she knows handsome, even blind)—and helped her balance at her push-along walker.  They followed her back to that damned green chair, settled her in, and disappeared.

I texted my siblings.  Everyone called.  The neighbors flocked in to make sure everything was okay.  Grandchildren texted, told us to read their messages to her.

Mom says she wants to die; she wants to be among the people she believes will greet her in heaven if only she endures what she’s been called to endure.  But I think she’s also terrified—this woman who has forever skimmed the boundary of death, one corpse after another after another.  She’s not the one who dies; she’s the angel of death.  And times like this—everyone gathered, everyone swooping in, all the reassurance that she matters even though she’s a burden: she’s radiant as a four-year-old child, astonished that we love her.  She wants to stay forever.