It was a summer-like Friday in late April when Francis and I played hooky from our responsibilities. At an outside table of a new local joint in Northeast Portland, we devoured a romesco-marinated veggie scramble with home fries and a shredded chicken slider with chipotle slaw on a biscuit. Amelia booped my knees with her nose begging for a refill of the scrambled egg plate the restaurant had given her for free. The lemon wedge in my perspiring glass of Diet Coke bobbed up and down as the surrounding ice cubes melted. The sun was warm on my v-necked chest and not glaring in my eyes and I felt grateful beyond all measure. Husband, dog, food, sun. Good things.
I wrapped Amelia’s leash around my hand as we stood up to walk home and glanced at my phone. There was an email from my mum in England.
“Honey, will you take Meals?” (that’s Amelia’s nickname)
Francis took the leash, and I walked slowly as I read. Then stopped as I read more.
Something had happened. My mother had suddenly lost the ability to walk. She had fallen while peeling a potato and could not get up from the floor, but the fall did not seem to be the culprit. My mum’s mobility had been deteriorating over the past few months, but she’s 82 and I thought this was an unfortunate and normal progression of aging. I was not expecting her legs to suddenly become inert. She wrote that she had been moved from her flat in an elderly community in Histon, a village outside of Cambridge, England, to an assisted living center in Cottenham, another village about 3 miles north. She and I have not lived in the same country for well over a decade.
Francis and I had plans to meet her in Scotland about a month from that day. We were scheduled to go on a tour from Glasgow to the Isle of Mull.
It was a little adventure on a minibus with a tour guide that my mum had been very excited to find, book, and share with us.
My fears about our travel plans had been growing every day. Would she need extra help? Probably. Extra time? Most definitely. Would I be able to manage her care properly? I was dubious. My mum was concerned too, frequently emailing the tour company with questions about steps and stops, and ground-level accommodations.
I’ve tried for years to attend to my mum with the care she requires and never felt accomplished with the task, physical or otherwise. It’s important to say that my mum and I haven’t lived together since I was 3 years old so there’s very little instinctual response for us. We can only imagine how to fulfill the other’s needs based on our own individual desires. When I was growing up, I saw her for one weekend a month. As an adult, I see her once every year or two. To expect either of us to have inherent impulses for the other’s physical or emotional care is beyond realistic. But you try, you know? You do your best.
As I read the news of my mother’s sudden handicap there was a part of me that felt relieved. Selfishly, I felt grateful that my husband and I would not have to manage her care in the moorlands of Scotland.
She wrote that she still wanted us to go on the trip without her and then come to Cottenham and tell her all about it. She was determined that we not change our plans.
We walked home and I made cookies.
Immediately.
Because that’s how I process big news: cookies.
That week I had so many questions about what was happening to my mum, but no way of sorting through them. Her reports of feeling trapped in a rapidly declining body were terrifying; the lack of doctor visits seemed questionably careless—even for the overloaded and understaffed NHS (the National Health System); and my instinct was to yell like Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment to get my mum some fucking medical attention. I knew; however, that this response would be considered a typical American overreaction my mum would not approve of. We are different.
One day I went out for my daily walk and as I gratefully inhaled the calm spring air I received a call from England. It was my mum’s friend and very distant cousin, Liz. My mum had been taken to the emergency room at Addenbrooke’s Hospital due to a bladder infection that had become septic.
I didn’t feel scared. I felt relieved.
“In all honesty, Liz, I’m thrilled she’s in the hospital! Maybe they’ll figure out why her legs suddenly don’t work!”
I could hear Liz smile through the phone.
“That’s what Dave (her husband) and I said too! Finally, someone will run the tests she needs! I’ll let you know more as it happens.”
But the infection was bigger than we knew. The nurse in the care home had called the ambulance after my mum’s blood pressure reading was so low it was indecipherable. Both Liz and my cousin Catherine ran to be with her in the ICU, hoping for a change.
Due to the time difference, I accidentally fell asleep as I waited for someone to call with an update.
In the middle of the night, my phone rang. It was Liz.
“The infection is much worse. She’s being treated but no one is sure what will happen. I think you should come. I know it’s the middle of the night there now. Why don’t you call the hospital first thing tomorrow morning and see what they say.”
Suddenly, I was more awake than I’d ever been. Do people know what to do normally, I wondered. This kind of thing must happen all the time. Do I just get dressed and go to the airport right now? That feels insane. But maybe right. Were these my mum’s final hours? I needed to be with her immediately, but the flight from Oregon to London plus travel to Cambridge would take almost a full day. I lay there questioning my unresponsive ceiling. How? When? What?
And then, around 4:oo am I saw a light pass over the beadboard; an illuminated twinkle that seemed to dance across the ceiling and point right at me. I thought, is that her? Is she gone? Was that goodbye?
A little while later I snuck downstairs and punched in the many numbers to ring my mum’s room in the ICU at Addenbrooke’s.
“Hallo?”
It was an attendant in the hospital.
“I’m calling for Elizabeth Tucker. I’m her daughter.” My voice sounded tiny and far away.
“Oh miss” the nurse sounded so forlorn.” … um…”
There was a pause and I felt cavernous.
And then, suddenly,
“Haaaallllllooooo!”
It was my mum, singing her greeting.
My hands felt like socks full of loose change. My eyeballs felt like balloons full of hot tea. My throat felt useless like I was trying to swallow a dry muffin. I didn’t believe what I was hearing, but there my mum was on the other end of the phone just as chipper as Mickey Mouse.
I replied, breathless, “Hello? I didn’t… I mean, I thought you were… I mean, hey how are you?!”
You can’t very well tell someone in the hospital you thought they had died.
“I’m wonderful, luv! I’ve never been better. I’m here with Catherine, who is waving, and some nurses and we’re just having the best time!”
It was conspicuous, this tone of hers. Because she’s never THAT perky.
After I hung up the phone, I jotted a quick email to my cousin Catherine who confirmed that the performance was a combination of sepsis and denial.
My mum did not want me to come to England. And I knew I had to.
In a few hours, I had adjusted my travel plans to fly directly to Heathrow the following Sunday.
The chasm of the unknown grew more intimidating as I wrapped up what I needed to. I felt like I was driving at a breakneck speed to a destination on a cliff at the end of the world, but I couldn’t see the road or the destination or the cliff. My foot was heavy on the gas, no brake pedal in sight, my heart pounding in my chest with no idea of what was coming.
Would I know what to do for her? Would I know how to advocate for someone with a lot of inflexible independence? Would she let me? There’s a fear of travel, a fear of change, a fear of losing continuity with my life, but they paled in comparison to the fear that I would be a useless supporter/ champion/ daughter for this woman I both know and don’t know at all.
I would be away from home for longer than I’d ever been, a reality that I compartmentalized into what felt like a jam jar in the bottom of my belly. I wish I still drank, I thought because that wouldn’t help at all, but it would feel like feelings. Drinking has a slick way of acting like you’re processing the bad stuff while numbing you out to the pain of the process, and that sounded fantastic. Alas, I wouldn’t give up my 15 years of sobriety for anything. Even my mum teetering on the brink of death. Yes, Mum, I know you’re screaming at your computer right now saying that you weren’t at the brink of death and I’m just being dramatic, but I didn’t know what was coming and you were really sick.
By the time I got to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, my mum’s sepsis had become manageable, and she had been moved from the ICU into the elderly care unit. I knew I’d made the right choice when I saw her.
The hospital had taken MRI’s of practically her whole body and still had no idea why she was experiencing paralysis from the waist down. My cousin Catherine and her husband Dominic stayed with me for a few nights at Liz and Dave’s house in Cottenham, which was empty because they had just left for vacation. We shared piquant lamb and spicy potatoes with puffy garlic naan at an Indian spot in Cottenham, while catching up. The following night after Dom had returned to London, Cat and I laughed about family and life as we slurped succulent Chinese noodles in Cambridge. In those little moments with my cousin (who I never really knew before this trip) I felt like a competent participant at the grown-up’s table. I had driven that wild speeding car not to the end of the world, but to this place, where I could care for my mum and myself.
The next morning, my mum texted that they had found a small non-malignant tumor on her T-3 and someone would be in to discuss what that meant later that day. The T-3 is neither a popular rap artist nor the third installment of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. It’s the third thoracic spinal nerve on the vertebrae. As we sipped coffee and nibbled biscuits, Cat and I agreed that this couldn’t be the culprit of anything since it was on her upper back, not her legs. Full disclosure: Cat is a lawyer, I’m a chef: not a diagnostician to be found at that breakfast table.
A few hours later, Cat, my mum, and I were chatting at her hospital bedside when the doctor in charge of the ward entered. She had big round brown eyes, fair skin with pinches of rose in her cheeks, and a pile of loose mahogany curls pulled back into a bun. She was like a gorgeous horse with a soft yet commanding countenance that everyone sat up straight for. Think Disney mare mixed with Helena Bonham Carter.
“We have some news,” she said after pulling the white privacy curtain around my mum’s quarter of the room. We inhaled. “There is a small, benign tumor pressing on your spinal column. It is the reason for your immobility and the reason for the infection. The tumor is slow growing but we don’t know how slow. It’s possible that the irreversible paralysis will stop at your legs and just as possible it will creep up into your arms and beyond. I know how hard this must be to hear.” She blinked her long eyelashes at my mum and repeated, “I know this is hard.”
I am an outburst-er, always making more suggestions or asking more questions than are appropriate. I wanted to know about surgery or treatment possibilities, but I read the room and bit my lip instead. I threaded my hand through the metal safety bars on my mum’s bed to stroke her arm compassionately, but the caress felt empty compared to the level of news we were processing.
My mum’s eyes were huge, her mouth open in shock as she looked at the beautiful doctor for a confirmation nod. Yes, it was real, the doctor’s face said. I suspect my mum knew it to be true deep inside too. Her pale arms covered her face and she made sounds like a wounded pup. And then the arms came down and she looked as though she’d lost 70 years. My mum, like a kid now, declared, “I’ve got my mind. My mind is still here and I will finish my writing!” She was absolutely beautiful. She was so clear and passionate and fearless in this moment and I swayed like a beech tree, amazed by what I was witnessing. Here was a woman I’d never met—soaring high above her apprehensions or angst. A writer whose greatest desire is to finish her book. How funny that each of our final wishes would be identical.
We made lists of supplies for the rest of her life: a new printer, vocal recognition software, a wheelchair.
Exhausted after the long day, my mum kissed me goodbye.
“I’ll be back first thing tomorrow.”
“I know,” she said.
“Love you.”
“Love you.”
I relocated to my mum’s flat in Histon. Cat returned to her life in London.
That night, I took a long walk around my mum’s village thinking about her. She grew up in Duxford, which is another village outside of Cambridge but moved to the States in her 20s. When I was growing up in New York, she lived in Washington DC and I visited her once a month. I remember the walks my we would take when I was a little girl, shlepping groceries from the Safeway across from Eastern Market to her rowhouse on Capitol Hill. It seemed like a marathon’s distance when it was only a few blocks and I whined constantly in the mid-summer humidity of DC. She always pushed me to walk more, saying that was the most important exercise you could get. And I do now. I walk obsessively. 5 miles a day. I walk and walk.
But she won’t. She won’t walk ever again I thought, and my heart ached for the privilege I still had; left, right, left, right, left, right.
Finally, I sat on a bench in the village green next to a pond with ducks waddling. The early summer sunset dappled soft orange onto the trees. It was so peaceful, this little village of hers. I took my phone out and wrote,
“I look forward to rolling you here someday soon.”
