Mary, my mother, has slipped from the self-sufficient woman, who raised six children, in a day and age, when public assistance was frowned on, to the four year old child, of years ago.
She sits in the hospital bed, and scoops with an imaginary shovel, the sand, into a bucket. And calls for Eddie, her older brother, who died in Vietnam, to take bucket and add it to the sand castle. She is playing, in her mind, once again, at Liberty Park in New York, on a sunshiny day. She is playing, once again, with the brother, she remembered, before the orphanage took her away, never seeing him again.
Later, after lunch, she naps. Suddenly, awakened from a sleepy travel again, by another bad dream. The one of the man on the green horse, that chases, her through the woods, back home in New York. An over grown child, big brown eyes, with her sheets pulled up close to her chin, not knowing where she is, frightened she cries herself back to sleep.
Is this the woman who raised us all, showing no fear, who worked so hard all those years? Or the shell of a mind, so long abused with alcohol and cigarettes, that the strokes have left her without memory of her own children, and grandchildren? Can this be what the next few days, or months, or years holds for this woman/child?
Am I to cry myself to sleep again tonight, and pray that she passes easily in her sleep, as she always told us she would rather do? Or do I pray for another day of her being with us? Which is more selfish?
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| Mary and Eddie, In the Sand Box |
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