Women

I am standing in a field crowded with women. There are thousands of us covering what must be twenty or thirty acres. We all stand facing the same direction shoulder to shoulder packed together like sardines. The women wear all sorts of casual clothing. The one to my left is maybe ten years younger than I am and of medium height. She wears a loose yellow cotton shirt with narrow, black horizonal stripes, a black knit sweater, charcoal gray capri pants and black ballet slippers. Her hair is short, brown and layered. She is nervous.

As soon as I realize that all the women here are mothers I hear a voice. It is a male voice and is coming through a loudspeaker, although I cannot see it or him. The voice asks all mothers who have lost a child to form a separate group to the front of this group. A surprisingly large number of women step forward, myself included. We huddle together in this new group, unformed, with nothing approximating the neat lines and rows and precision stance of the previous group. All we want is to rejoin the first group. The wanting is an terrible anguish, a deep physical pain. Several of us are crying.

The voice then announces that if we have other children, we can rejoin the first group. We know the voice is speaking only to us, this second, lost group of mothers. If they have not already been crying, most of the mothers break down in tears of joy as they scurry back to the larger group and shoulder their way into the ranks. There must be about fifty of us left, mothers who have no other children.

If you have a spouse, please rejoin the first group. More than thirty of the women leave. Grateful, glad. If you can physically have more children, rejoin. More leave. If you have a brother, rejoin. Another leaves. there are only a handful of us left. If you have a sister, rejoin. We are down to two. We two are so very frightened and lonely. If you have a niece, rejoin. We stare at each other, terrified. If you have a nephew, rejoin. She looks pityingly at me before she breaks into tears and runs back into the group. I am alone.

I pray for the voice to call out something else. If you are a nice person, rejoin. If you loved your son, rejoin. If you have a cat, rejoin. But the voice is gone. I turn around to stare at the huge mass of women, of mothers, but they too are gone and I am completely and utterly alone.

When I wake up, even though I try, I cannot determine if this was a dream . . . or not.

Three

Until Colby passed we were a family of three. Colby, my mom, and me. Colby and I in Nashville. Mom outside of Minneapolis. Mom is elderly. It is hard for her to get around. Other than going to the neighborhood store, post office and library, Mom doesn’t go many places. Instead, she saves all her big errands for the several times a year Colby and I come to visit. Then ensues a whirlwind 10 days of going here and there, doctor’s appointments, hardware store, big box stores, garden store, and on and on. Of course, this was before.

The usual plan was that I drove and dropped Colby and Mom at the entrance of wherever it was we were going. He helped her out of the car and into the store. Mom is wobbly and walks very slowly, even with assistance, so his guidance was much needed. I’d park the car, then join them inside. But now, without Colby, all of this is much more difficult. Now, there are two options. One is to pull up to an entrance, help Mom out of the car and then guide her to a seat outside, or just inside the building, and hope I do not block traffic in the process. Even if the seating is 20 feet from the car, it is a five minute process to get her out of the car and escort her to the seat. Or, we can park in handicapped parking if the parking is no more than 20 or 30 feet from the door. As you can imagine, There are a number of stores, restaurants, offices that I just can’t get Mom into.

Mom walks with a cane and gets around a little better inside a store by leaning on a shopping cart as she pushes it. Forget about a walker, wheelchair or even the motorized carts you sit in and drive around the store. She won’t hear of any of them. She would discuss those things with Colby, but he had not yet gotten her to commit to trying any of those options. She also wore her hearing aids for him, but, not for me. This means she cannot hear the instructions I give her to please stay put until I park the car and get back to her. Often by the time I get to wherever I left her she has toddled off somewhere, usually not the store she had planned on going to. So I frantically dash in and out of store after store as I try to find her. By the time I do she is exhausted and can’t figure out why it took me so long to park the car.

Mom is my only family member. I want, need, her around a long time but at close to 87, reality says otherwise. I would love it if my time with her were not so frustrating, exhausting, draining, exasperating. And, when family once was three, it is now quite hard being two, especially because I know that before long the two will be just one.