When home was gone from our mother’s head, except as
fragments of childhood memory, she set out walking to find it. She went at 3
am, in her nightie, past our sleeping father, through three doors, across the
grass, and onto a North Carolina highway. Two kind young men managed not to hit
her with their car and brought her home to a place she didn’t recognize, the
retirement home where she had lived for five years.
Strapped in a chair, she angled her eighty pounds, slithered
free and started home, was caught at the outside door and re-confined. She flew
over the bars of her bed in the nursing center and headed for the outdoors.
They imprisoned her broken wrist in a cast and tied her down.
These are the first two paragraphs of an essay my mother
wrote in 1995 called “Walking Home.” She wrote it during an annual writing retreat
she had with her two sisters. She says it came out in one sitting, essentially
in a single draft.
Mom was still in her private apartment in assisted living
when she decided late one night that she had to walk a few miles to a local
park, a place she hadn’t visited in years, to retrieve a book she was sure she
had left there that day. She was discovered on the highway near the facility
and brought back. About a year later she once again left the facility in the
middle of the night. When the staff found her, at the top of a hill behind the
building—with her walker for once—she had no idea where she was, nor why she
had left. At that point, it was clear Mom needed to go to the dementia wing of
her retirement facility, known as the Courtyards.
Whether because of better information, or simply better
funding, the Courtyards handle dementia patients better than was the case in my
grandmother’s facility. Mom has never needed to be strapped into a chair, or
tied to a bed, to keep her safe. The rooms are reached through a pair of double
doors, accessed by a keypad code; it’s understood people lacking short-term
memory will not be able to memorize a code, assuming they ever learn it at all.
The semi-private rooms all branch off a
large space drenched with light from windows and a skylight. An aviary of
brightly colored, chipper birds sits at one end of the room. A resident cat and
dachshund wander the space, accepting affection and surreptitious treats,
visiting and napping with the residents. An outdoor space with raised beds is
accessible to the clients at any time; all the doors lead back into the main
room. Soft music from the 40s and 50s plays any time a classic movie musical
isn’t on the TV. Every effort has been made to create an environment that is
soothing, welcoming and bright. My mother loves the staff and many of the
clients she lives with. Nonetheless, Mom still regularly announces her
intention to go home.
Before her condition confined her to a wheel chair, she
would circle the communal space, looking for a way out. This behavior is so
common among people with dementia they have a term for it: ‘exiting.’ But Mom always
walked, long before the dementia began robbing her of herself. Her essay about
her mother continues:
Why did she walk? I believe it was because there is comfort
in movement, whether or not you have a destination in mind. The Catholic
faithful walk the Stations of the Cross, climb the holy mountain and end where
they began. The Australian Aborigines sing and walk their circular journey all
their lives, for hundreds and hundreds of miles, singing their souls into being.
Their paintings reveal ancestral maps, family maps, of the earth and of the
soul: each tuft of grass, each animal, a totem or way-station. There are no shortcuts;
you must walk and sing all of the lines, to find your way home. Pilgrimage
sends you away and brings you back. I like to think that my mother, far gone in
Alzheimer’s, was on pilgrimage as well, though she didn’t know her ending
place.
My mother also found comfort in movement. She walked twice a
day with the dog, traversing a large circle around the college campus near her
home. It was exercise, therapy for chronic depression and anxiety, and a way of
anchoring herself to place. Ever since reading Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, she had loved the concept
of singing and walking existence into health. It suggested a way to shape her own
spiritual practice around the tasks of daily life, deepening them into ritual. She
writes,
I know it nourishes me to walk and work and touch the house
totems: dishwater, broom, bread dough, black dirt, seedlings, weeds. Sometimes
I only pace in tight circles, but it is better to be on my way, along the
songlines, totem by totem.
Mom was the person who first showed me that home is as much
a set of routines and habits as it is a location. She, often in the face of
derision, firmly claimed her status as both feminist and homemaker. Even when
her writing began to get some of the attention it deserved, she always insisted
writer take second billing to homemaker on her resume. She built a haven for her family through daily
actions. She prepared tasty, nutritious meals, washed laundry, built book
cases, performed basic carpentry and plumbing. She shared favorite books, music,
television and radio shows, and in various ways kept us and the house in good
health. Though we all loved that house, and did our part to make it a home,
there’s no question Mom was the central animating spirit of the place, and that
walking was vital to her work.
Walking is prayer. Walking, life flows up the leash from the
dog to me. Here are my morning totems: the molefield, where eruptions of black
dirt and mushroom circles make a mockery of lawnkeepers’ cosmetic hopes; a
great catalpa with tree-sized branches and leaves as big as dinner plates; a
many-mooded face in profile, carved by nature out of a cedar tree’s long-ago wound;
beside the Quaker Meeting House: bronze Mary Dyer, hanged on Boston Common for
walking her faith, now sitting eternally at worship; a field shared by killdeer
and those benign monsters, the horses; the houses of friends and
fellow-walkers; a continuity of school children waiting for the bus. At last I
see the outside of home and then feel its embrace.
Until college brought a new routine, the morning dog walk
was my responsibility and pleasure. The path I evolved overlapped with this one
at many points, and gave my day an anchor I valued even as a teenager. It has
been my good fortune to be able to return regularly to the home where I
grew up, still inhabited by parents who loved the place, the rituals, and one
another. Tagging along on the afternoon walk, as I did most afternoons when
visiting, let me touch base with our shared totems and reconnected me to that
anchor. I no longer thought of that house or walk as home, really, but
returning to them always rejuvenated me.
Or at least it did,
until my parents began to deteriorate. For both Mom and Dad, failing health
began to erode their ability to do the work they had loved. Dad’s arthritis and
failing eyesight eventually made reading, writing and traveling impossible.
Mom’s failing memory and physical frailties attacked every aspect of her day;
reading, writing, walking the dog, cooking, carpentry, gardening, all of it
became impossible or dangerous. An unexpected consequence of this was the
beloved home became a death trap. Stairs transformed into rickety ladders,
sharp corners, pill bottles and dirty dishes sprouted like weeds, even the gas
stove turned treacherous, waiting for a forgotten pot or Styrofoam container to
wreak havoc. In the past, I had wondered
how I would feel when Mom and Dad no longer needed that house. I assumed its
loss would be wrenching, no matter how necessary. But without my mother’s
animating spirit and tireless efforts, the house turned malevolent. Even now,
when it no longer threatens my parents’ well-being, the house has ceased being
the beloved haven; it mostly sits as a warehouse for possessions that have lost
their purpose, and whose demand for attention will, I know, become increasingly
shrill.
Again to my surprise, a similar process seems to have
occurred with the daily walk. Over the
last four years, Mom’s difficulties with moving slowed and shortened the walks
until she was forced to abandon them all together. Fang, the last dog, designated
herself Mom’s guardian at the first sign of trouble, and would leave her side
only under duress. She was the first to decide that without Margie, the walk
was simply not quite right, maybe not even worth doing. She’d drag along for
the first half of the increasingly truncated trip, looking over her shoulder at
the house. The return would be an Iditarod, one’s arm wrenched from
the shoulder from her need to get back to her charge. Fang survived Mom’s move
into assisted living only by nine months. She was thirteen, a good age for a big
dog, and deeply devoted to the kind man who move into the house to care for her,
but I wonder if she also felt that her life’s purpose was gone.
On my visits back to see family, I still make time walk the
beloved old route, though not every day. I visit the giant catalpa Mom
considered a friend, and continue her tradition of hugging it. I greet Mary
Dyer in her old spot, and the horses in their new one. I pass familiar houses,
filled with unfamiliar residents. It’s pleasant enough, but not the same. Maybe
a dog would help, but I think what’s really missing is Mom. If I returned to
live there, and took this walk every day again, I’m sure I would enjoy it. But
I’d be building a new tradition, if I were lucky. The old song is gone.
I’ve come to realize that part of my trouble is, while the
old places and paths are no longer home, I haven’t created new ones yet to
replace them. My apartment of almost twenty years is a residence, and a
pleasant one, but not home. Likewise, the many walks I take throughout the city
are merely utilitarian or exercise. None of them have developed deeper
resonance, and after more than twenty years, I don’t expect they will. Maybe the
cause is my move away from any spiritual belief; maybe adulthood can never
compete with childhood, especially one as nurturing and myth-making as mine; maybe
it’s the simple fact that I don’t enjoy living in cities. (I’d say that what
rituals I’ve developed here have more to do with the abundance of take-out food.
Nice enough, to be sure, but not the same.)
My craving for home is strong, but vague. I don’t know how
to build it, or where to seek it yet. Maybe it will form in some way independent of place. But I suspect walking will play
a leading role. My mother’s example, in this and other ways, will continue to
shape my approach to home. Her essay concludes:
But it isn’t enough to be home; one should always be going
there. My mother is seven years dead, but sometimes I dream of attaching myself
to her by an invisible line, unconfining but unbreakable, so I can keep her
safe and follow her on pilgrimage. We’ll greet our totems, sing the journey,
and rest at need, till we get home.