Alone at the Last

1. 
   
   

   IT was many years ago, when we left as a family.  An entire unit of five taking our earthly goods and leaving one side of the continent for the other.  Behind us would be the grandparents, those in Jersey, and my mother alone in Pennsylvania.  It escaped me, her reaction, as we drove out of the narrow lane that leads from her house that my dad built a half century ago.  ...Until Bill said, "I have never thought your mother could cry."  

   
   

   My head must have swung to his face in astonished shock.  My mother had never cried other than that period of 2 weeks in my senior year of high school.   She had been sitting at a table, her face in her hands looking out the back window into that open weedy field beyond the yard.  I had no idea why she was crying.  I never asked.  It bothered me in the strangest way, assuming it was my fault, the cause of her pain...I felt angry rather than empathic.  She never explained, the crying, it was never disclosed.

   
   

   And now, my husband tells me she is crying again.  This time I know.  It is my fault.  But she will be fine.  She will get past this, it's no big deal.  After all, we are only moving away.  It isn't like we died or something.  There will be visits, there always were.  Even when I was in college, I came home a couple times a year, usually to stay way longer than break, going back after yet another suspended era, only to reregister again and again.  That could only have been an annoyance having me come and stay off and on...why is this time any different?

   
   

   The years went by so quickly.  We did return, some of us.  One of us.  The rest of the unit was scattered.  

   
   

   Again the condition, the state of mind, of my Mother had to be pointed out to me, described, applied to my awareness.  The old woman had never been old before to me.  She had been the strong one.  The cook, the seamstress, someone who always was safe in her own world, her seemingly shallow existence.  Her ability to have hidden her own world was that bulwark that separated me and protected me from what would one day "be" me.  She was a bastion all of my life against all adversarial contrivances which one might meet.  Mom was never even sick.  She had headaches for a time, but that time was  passed.

   
   

   And now as with her, I have no headaches.  Age has moved me beyond that, beyond hormonal driven consequences.  I have entered that life that was a dark area around the eyes, that dark area that has moved behind the eyelids and situated uncomfortably but permanently in the conscience.  

   
   

   Some of her mystery now is unravelled.  The sadness at our departure, now I know, I feel.  She lived alone, as I do now.  The weekends come and go, and we go nowhere.  We look at the grease that coats a wall in the kitchen and we hate being alone with that grease.  Short attempts to erase it are met with stabbing alerts to our futile goal, the meaningless acts of ordinary daily musters needed for no one, since we are alone.

   
   

   And at last I feel guilty again for having not shared her grief for merely being alive still, and alone.  Another holiday comes and goes, as we stay inside the old house alone.  Living out her pain like a surrogate, I become the real thing.  She lived too long a life, and I wonder if I must trudge a long time as well.