Travel Reference
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ternoon to spend the weekend. There had been a blizzard the day before, and when I got
off the bus at Queen Anne Road, it was snowing again, and I looked down Van Buren
Avenue, past our house, and saw something I couldn't believe.
At the end of the block, maybe two hundred yards beyond our driveway, the Dodge
was embedded, front end first, in a snowbank. I knew the engine was still running be-
cause exhaust was coming out of the exhaust pipe. I tore down the block and found my
mother in the driver's seat. She was perfectly calm, listening to the radio, waiting pa-
tiently, and rather cheerfully, to be rescued.
She'd woken up that morning and decided to go to the supermarket. She asked the
woman who was working for us then—someone not too bright, evidently—to help her
into the car and to put the wheelchair into the trunk. Then she'd just backed out of the
driveway (no mean feat, actually, if you recall our driveway) and took off. How she was
going to get out of the car once she got there, how she was going to get the wheelchair out
of the trunk, or shop, for that matter, or come home—she just trusted those things would
somehow get taken care of. When I found her and expressed, um, dismay, she said she
was disappointed she hadn't gotten any farther. Still, I think she considered the outing a
success; it was not something she apologized for.
My mother endured more indignities than I want to recall, enough so that I often felt
she was suffering for me and for our whole family, and enough so that I stopped believ-
ing in God, though now that she's gone I'm beginning to rethink that, believing He has a
great deal to answer to her for and hoping that He knows it.
She was sick for so long that I remember her only as ill. That's partially my fault, but
mostly I blame the disease, which not only crippled her physically but kept the healthy
part of her buried. It restricted her access to the world of information, it created gaps
in her memory, it weakened her voice, and toward the end it undermined her intellectual
capacity and ability to speak clearly. She was robbed of the tools of social engagement
that most of us take for granted, and this, I think, was the source of her greatest suffer-
ing. She rarely complained—to me, anyway—about her physical problems. She did say
often that she had a hard time making friends.
I've been thinking of how lonely she must have felt, living vibrantly inside the crypt
of disease; it's unfathomable to me that so much of what was going on inside of her nev-
er came out. Two or three days before she died, in a sudden moment of recollection, she
spoke of Elvis Presley, someone no one in our family could remember ever hearing her
mention. I miss her now terribly, not least because I'm heartbroken at what I missed
while she was alive. And I'm simply in awe of her survivor's will and the courage it took
for her to endure.
