mother is an industrious ant, always scurrying to and fro in an effort to make life orderly and clean, an effort which sometimes extends to ordering things that need no ordering and cleaning when a little messy fun wouldn’t hurt. For a small woman, weighing barely 60 kilos and standing at 160cm, she is and always was full of energy when it came to chores and errands.
If close my eyes, I can hear the exact sound and pattern of her house slippers tap tapping loudly across the apartment, a sound that used to signal me to put away the fantasy book I was reading instead of whichever school subject I was supposed to be studying. At the end of this tap tapping, she’d barge into the room and deposit some freshly ironed clothes or something of mine she found in not quite the right place, before whirring off to the next thing that she thought needed doing — a woman full of love for her family, inexhaustibly, tirelessly at work to maintain the nest.
Today, though, I watch her limp across the room, her face wincing with swallowed pain. She’s leaning sideways to relieve some weight from her right leg. She’s on her way to clean up something, or to finish lunch, or to remind my father about something that needs doing.
The pain that emanates down her leg and makes her almost unable to walk comes from a spinal disc protrusion that presses on her spinal cord. It’s a recent condition that has come to her unexpectedly, as conditions do, and she’s been waiting for it to subside for more than three months now. It has only gotten worse since: her limp more pronounced, her walking range diminished, and she was forced to take painkillers to manage a few hours of sleep. Her nights are a gruelling ordeal as she wakes up in pain, alone amid the rest of us sleeping unbothered.
The sound of her feet approaches my room and the door cracks open slightly, a familiar event that has played out a thousand thousand times over the last 28 years. She’s checking whether I’m asleep, or whether I need something, or to tell me I need to do something, or just to tell me something that she thinks I ought to hear. But all of that is just a pretext — there’s no real reason for her to enter the room beside wanting to be close to a son who’s been away for much too long now. She’ll invent a thing or two that needs to be done in my room only because I’m in my room. If I were anywhere else, then she’d invent something that needs doing wherever I am.
She peers through the door, checks to see that I’m awake, and then enters as she always does. She does not barge in. There’s none of her customary vigor and gregariousness. Instead, she slowly limps toward the bed and falls into it with a sigh of relief, her leg outstretched in an effort to soothe the pain. She looks at me, asks what am I doing, why am I lying on the floor — all of it tinged with her eternal worry. I tell her I’m resting my painful back.
It hurts that bad?
Yeah, today it does.
Lying on the floor helps?
A little, especially if I raise my legs up.
Are you doing something?
Yeah, I’m writing.
Ok.
She ruffles my hair, then gets up. Her face is like a clenched fist from the painful effort as she starts slowly toward the door. I watch her leave the room and am suddenly visited by an unwelcome thought:
She’s gotten older.
It’s a thought triggered by her ungainly limp, and my own back pain, but it goes deeper than that. The limp and the pain will disappear or at least subside, and she’ll return to her normal self eventually, one way or another. But her present state serves as a reminder to me that she’s been alive for nearly six decades now and that it won’t last forever. There will, inevitably, come a time when she knocks on the door of my room for the last time. Either because she’ll be gone, or because I will.
Eventually, all of us will be gone. My mother, my father, my sister, my friends, me, you, and those you hold dear too. I often wonder whether I’ll have used the life I have as best as I could when the grim reaper taps me on my shoulder? Or will I spend it irritated, forgetful, chasing money, or influence, spending too much of it on my dumbphone, liking and tweeting at the expense of those people who might be sitting right here next to me? Will I let its light bathe my face instead of the light from their eyes. Will I hold a grudge against a friend and not tell her, even though I know tomorrow might not come? Will I raise my voice in anger when what’s needed is to raise it in song?
Unknown artist.
My mother limps across the dining room, her human transience underlined by her present illness.
She’s gotten older, and so have we all. Some of us are already gone, and when I think of them I ask myself whether I could done better. I know I could have been kinder, but wasn’t. More forgiving. More concerned with being a friend rather than being right. Less eager to go eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Less willing to carry perceived slights and disappointments rather than let go and carry on with my life.
What do you see when you look back?
I hope to be there for those of us who are still around, for your sake and mine. I hope to remember to cherish the time we do have together while we still have it, rather than regret my priorities later on when the candle blows out.
And as I write the word hope I realize it’s not enough. To hope that I’ll be more present just means I’m shifting the burden of responsibility. If I hope to be more present, then I’m not being more present and, if I am, then there’s no need to hope for it— because it is being done.
This is not my New Year’s resolution.
Finally, I won’t wait for the 1st of January to invest more time and effort into the people I hold dear. This is not a New Years resolution because those are just another way to procrastinate. If it’s important enough to do in the new year, then it’s important enough to do it today.
Why wait?
Before you go…
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