The Gravity Of Love
Barbara Selmo
William Ottley, 1828. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum
Word Count 1410
My brother’s unexpected death had unraveled my mother. How quickly she changed from someone who could make her own meals into someone who put yellow dishwashing liquid in the frying pan instead of cooking oil. Less than two months after my brother’s funeral, her story became the story people my age always tell about their parents—she fell, was hospitalized, then moved to a nursing home.
Every weekend, I drove from Boston to Connecticut to visit her. I could have stayed overnight at her house, the house where I grew up, which was standing locked and closed, unused. But the stillness there made me cringe. Everything reminded me of her lasting touch, the last time she had moved a dish or made the beds. I walked around the house, telling the different rooms that she was well, that she was ok, that I had seen her only that afternoon. And that she was not coming back. I felt the house recoil, diminish, settle deeply into its foundation. The house knew me, but I could never command it. It was built by her, cared for by her, obeyed her and no one else.
Each weekend moved me into a new role, a new place in life that was not on the familiar planet of Us, spinning slowly and steadily on the same axis over the last 57 years. As my mother’s caretaker, I was now on a strange, partially built spaceship, headed into an undefined universe, with old companions like my brother gone and strange new companions like social workers and nurses in the passenger seats, bumming a ride on my journey, dropping off into infinity whenever they had executed their duties.
On Saturdays, I arrived in town by eleven a.m. and make a quick stop at the Stop & Shop for a cookie tray for the staff and fashion magazines, flowers, and the local papers for her. Once I arrived at Pine Woods, we played cards in her room and looked at the magazines, slowly turning every page so my mother could examine the dresses, comment on the colors and the styles. We read each issue this way, twice through. At every visit, I assessed how she looked and spoke. In the nicer weather of the spring and summer, I took her out for lunch and even some shopping. In stores she admired everything, stroking the shirt or skirt I would hold up for her approval. “Ch’e bella,” she murmured. “Ch’e bella.”
During that one long summer, every outing was a trip of remembrances. My mother would narrate her memories of each road we drove on, which ones were her route to my brother’s house, which she and my father took to get to the grocery store or the gas station. I remembered her in the companionable bubble of present and past. We would end our afternoons at an ice cream stand on Litchfield Road, a place she and my father had frequented—a low, white building right off the road with benches outside. Everyone came on sunny afternoons—older couples, families with small children. Sometimes, when we were the only two, we sat quietly while my mother enjoyed her mint chocolate chip. In summers past, we might have eaten ice cream outside in the backyard of her house, sitting on old lawn chairs. I might have suggested we go out for a treat, but her response was usually “But why?” Anticipating this, I would have picked up a package of Eskimo Pies for us to enjoy. This summer, she happily went out with me for the afternoon, so I kept returning to that ice cream stand. When there, she seemed more like the mother I remembered from before my brother’s death. The bright white benches, the happy small groups coming in, the fact that our time there was just part of the pleasant afternoon’s passeggiata—a little outing, she would say.
When we returned to her facility, she always hesitated about getting out of the car. “Why are we here?” she asked. “I’ll wait in the car.” “Oh, come in for a coffee, “ I would say. Once inside, we sat on a lobby couch. I brought her coffee from the coffee stand. We chatted about the wall murals—enlarged photos of my hometown from the prior centuries. She thought they were photos of the Italian village where she grew up. Later, we would go up to her room on the third floor. By 5 pm, when her dinner was brought in, I would begin the goodbyes. I cried every weekend, no matter how well she looked or what joy we had had together. I cried as I drove down the driveway to the main street, backhanding tears from my cheeks and wiping the inside of my glasses with a wet finger.
On this cold, rainy November day, I was moving her to Boston so she could be nearer to me. My mother sat in the back seat, in her brown winter coat and pink beret, with my daughter’s velvet lap blanket over her knees. She was excited to drive with me. As always, it didn’t matter to her where I was going. In the driver’s seat, I was sweating under my coat. I had known I would move her from the day she entered Pine Woods and now I had made it come to pass. Cocooned in the car, the classical music station softly playing on the radio, I drove northeast, grabbing quick looks at my mother’s face in the rearview mirror. She couldn’t hear well, so I didn’t speak but turned to throw her a smile every once in a while. She commented on the familiar roads. The last eleven months, I realized, we had been saying goodbye to the restaurants and shops of our town, to spontaneous lunches, to drives together, to free time outside in the sun. They had been a long preparation for this move, for this, the hardest of all those drives. I tensed inside as we passed the turnoff that led to our neighborhood and her house, locked and dark, waiting for her to return, to bring it alive again. She said nothing about that right turn at the light. The farther we drove, the more I wished I could have turned right. That is what I wished. I wanted her to be at the center of our universe again, immutable and eternal, not the very old, very frail lady in the back seat of my car, humming to herself.
We passed Harwinton, Burlington, West Hartford, Hartford. The light rain continued from the gray sky. The gray day grew darker. By 4 pm, we arrived at Senior Living House, where a cluster of smiling and soft-spoken staff gathered around us, bringing her into their orbit, into the soft light of the 4th floor. She smiled unfailingly but grew concerned about the new surroundings, the new people. She murmured to me, “Take me home, take me home,” although I didn’t know what home she was thinking of. By 5 pm, the social worker took her gently by the arm and led her into the dining hall, motioning for me to make my exit. My last view of my mother was her small, hunched figure, arm in arm with the young staff member, silhouetted in the door of the brightly lit dining room, about to enter her new universe.
I took the elevator down. I had taken her away from the town where she had lived since 1952. I had taken her away from ever again seeing the house she built with my father, where she had raised me and my brother, where she had lived undisturbed and complete. I knew that the old, frail woman in the pink beret, lost within the kindly scrum of attendants upstairs, would never again find what was missing, would never again go home. I wanted her near me, so I moved her. Because only through the glow of her recognition could I feel that we were still together on our small planet, still intact and held by the gravity of love.
Barbara writes memoirs and creative non-fiction but started her writing life as a poet. She holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins. She stepped away from creative writing for many years and now, through the auspices of Grub Street Boston, the tutelage of Dorian Fox, and the generative community gathered by author Diane Zinna, she has returned to writing and to creative non-fiction. She is working on a memoir about her immigrant family and growing up in Northwest Connecticut, as well as a collection of essays about her mother. The Sun published a Reader's Write piece in 2019.