In her mid-eighties, the map of our mother’s daily life grew smaller. She quit driving at night, and later she drove only on quiet local streets to the grocery store. When she finally abandoned the car, she emphasized to her children, all in our fifties and sixties by then, that she made the decision herself — we hadn’t told her she must stop.
A few years earlier, she gave up beloved slow-running games of tennis with her siblings, and now she only stepped around the condominium complex. Eventually, she limited herself to gripping the handles of a snazzy metallic blue walker and moving from room to room inside her own condo. Intensely committed to avoiding a fall, she pushed the walker more slowly across the narrowing geography of her days. She did not want to move to a senior living community, and as with driving she did not want anyone to make the decision for her. And she did not want to leave that home so full of markers of a long life with and then finally without our father.
In time she did decide, though, and the map of her days narrowed again. After settling into a senior care center, she asked us to sell the condo. She didn’t have the energy for the task, she said. She could see that the map would not be widening.
On one level this was true. But when her energy allowed, during quiet conversations in her one room or out on the center’s patio, windows onto past decades re-opened and details lost to family history re-emerged. When she was not too tired, she ranged in conversation over the inner and outer territories of her life. Stories emerged that I had never heard before. The anecdotes sparked reflection and provoked emotion, sometimes satisfaction and other times regret. I found she was still considering the mystery of her long marriage to our quiet father. She was still pondering the view of religion she had been offered at the church her parents attended eight decades ago. In her wheelchair, she still journeyed across the wide map of her life, reviewing meanings that she had previously accepted for this or that incident.
She talked about church life as she knew it in her early twenties. One time, a man of the cloth told her bluntly that her branch of Christianity wasn’t a true enough faith to carry her toward heaven, and she still bristled at his coldness seven decades later. She repeatedly mentioned that her home denomination’s dogma called for ostracizing someone dear to her for who he was. For her, teasing apart the sustenance of faith and the arrogance of denominations was the work of a lifetime. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, she used to say when I was young.
In those quiet conversations on unscheduled topics she worked her way across her life’s map of incidents and meanings. One of her last requests was this: She knew that her great-grandchildren were too young now to remember her when they grew older. Nevertheless, she asked me to brainstorm with her about how they could come to understand that she had loved them. Just a few days before we lost her, she got to work on that question, in conversation, in the narrow space of her one room and in the still-wide space of her long life.
