Mother's Last Time Behind the Wheel

The last time my mother drove a car lingers in my mind as a defining moment. I haven’t been able to write about most of the things that remain so fresh after Mother’s health began failing. The images are still painful—driving, cooking a pot of pinto beans, walking down the driveway from her house on the land to my 2-story barn/home, so much more.

When things changed, they changed with dizzying speed. I need to say this, though, because if we live long enough, it will happen to all of us, and we will remember our last time behind the wheel. We’ll long for the 75-yard walk down the driveway. And even though we might groan at the thought of cooking yet another pot of pintos—sorting and washing the dried beans, peeling and mincing the garlic and onion, we’ll yearn to be in the kitchen because being physically able to prepare a meal that nurtures someone becomes emblematic of our worth, at least in our minds.

Some people might ease in to that time of life that limits us, re-defines us, but it was really hard for our mother. How many times I heard her speak out in frustration because she felt worthless. “I just wish I could help.” Even after her heart had failed to the point that it wore her out just to sit on a stool in the shower while our oldest sister, Joan, Mother’s caregiver, gave her a bath, Mother still tried to make her bed some days, maybe when she felt especially that she needed to prove to herself that bed making hadn’t escaped her. And I remember once or twice that she just couldn’t finish the job. No doubt there were many more days.

We’ll all find out, some day, if we live long enough, how incapacitating a failing heart can be. More than once, on days when she felt so bad, “sick, I just feel so sick.” She remembered clearly taking care of Daddy and her mother, both who battled the same congestive heart failure, and both who mourned feeling “so sick”, too sick to eat a bowl of cream of wheat, too sick to answer the call of a fresh peach pie, too sick to sit outside on the patio on a gorgeous cool, sunny day. She remembered and exclaimed that she hadn’t really understood. We will all understand some day, if we live long enough.

Right now, I remember all those times that I felt impatient as Mother made herself miserable because she felt worthless. I couldn’t convince her that it was okay to let others do for her, finally. And though invariably she became frustrated and angry when I would say, “Mother, just count your blessings that you have family who are able to help you,” only toward the end of her struggle did she give in, though still not completely, to that which had reduced her, that which had forced her to let go of her hard-working, German work ethic. To the very end, she wouldn’t hear of a hospital bed. On the Saturday of a family gathering to celebrate our middle sister Sue’s 65^th birthday, I heard Mother say to the hospice nurse from the hospital bed that she used for less than two weeks, on the Saturday less than a week before she died, “I want to sleep in my bed.”

There’s so much more to be said about Mother and her life of hard work, a life of being productive—in her early 80s making the 90-mile drive from west of Houston to the place in rural Leon County, at 80 buying rock to line the beds in her yard, and up until that day in September of 2001, when she still continued to cook, for “an army” if family was coming. That day in September things changed forever for her. Then began the long journey of decline and compromise. Only one more time did she sit behind the wheel of her Chevy Blazer. I see her bravely starting out down the road, not long after her first stay in the hospital, and I wondered how important this drive would become in time. We all understand now, at least a little.

Mother’s Last Time Behind the Wheel—Santa Fe New Mexico (May 15, 2008)

R. Harold Hollis