During the last Skype call Lucy made last week she asked Mom if she was "still upset about Adjipah eating your fish?" Mom tried to smile but with her teeth out and the tube taped to her nose her smile showed up in her eyes and not so much on her lips.
I felt bad that Lucy was seeing Mom at her most vulnerable to the ravages of age. So while we talked to Mom, I opened an album of pictures of her and whispered, "See how beautiful your great-grandmother really is? Look!"
Lucy nodded and said loudly to the screen "You're beautiful, Noni!"
Mom heard Lucy and moved slightly and managed of a hint of a crumpled smile. Then Lucy said in a loud awed whisper,
"She heard me! She nodded! She smiled!"
I placed my hand on the laptop screen and showed Lucy that when the lower part of her face was hidden from the bridge of her nose up to her eyes and silver hair, Mom still looked like the lovely pictures in the album.
From time to time I'd ask, "Mom, do you remember that?" about this or that detail of her childhood and she'd open her eyes a bit wider to signal that she did remember. Any mention of her early years that got the biggest response. The neural pathways were shutting down and the last remaining seemed to be the memories of her life as a young child. The little girl who had once been Mom was looking at us through a thicket of memory loss and confusion. I reminded her of the five week trip she took back to China with my wife Genie when Mom was in her eighties. In the early 1990s they'd traveled for 5 weeks to Mom's birthplace in Wenchow, on the coast of southern China.
Amazingly, given the communist "remake" of China and the destruction of everything old and beautiful that blocked "progress," Genie and Mom found the mission compound still as it once was. Mom was welcomed by the people living in her old home and that allowed to wander through the buildings. Genie said that Mom remembered everything from the dusty courtyard where she had played, to the thick gate with the little barred window she used to look through while wishing that she could go into the street and join the passing processions during festivals.
I knew that each Skype call might be the last time I'd see my mother alive. So each time we talked I thanked Mom for her love and the terrific creativity she'd shown in how she raised her children. Reading Mom her book reminded me of the many hours my mother had read so many wonderful books to me out loud. She was such a glorious reader.
After about half an hour of sitting on my lap watching Mom sleep, wake and sleep again as I read to her, Lucy went to my easel and painted. A few minutes later she cheerfully called out to the screen; "This is a painting for you Noni! I'll give it to you in heaven since you're going to die before I see you." Lucy said this very matter of factly with no fear, as if she was mentioning that she'd soon be seeing her great-grandmother someplace very ordinary. I don't think she heard Lucy, but if she did, Mom would have liked what she said because my mother was nothing if not a believer in a literal heaven.
When the two hours or so we spent with Mom concluded Lucy was sitting up on a high stool in the kitchen while I was putting on her boots for the walk back to Lucy's house.
"I'm so sad my mother is going to die soon, " I said.
"You will be alright Ba," Lucy said.
"How?" I asked.
"You have me," she quietly answered and put her arms around me.
I trust my mother's hope-filled view of death because of the way Mom lived her life. Mom first introduced me to a non-retributive loving Lord who did not come to "die for us" to "satisfy" an angry God but came as a friend who ended all cycles of retribution and violence.
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