A backward look

En route to Prospect Park for a sunset walk, I stopped at these York-and-Lancaster roses intertwined near a stately old apartment building on Parade Place. The little arbor felled me with remembrance: Exactly 15 years ago, I passed these roses every day on a very different walk, to visit my mother in Caledonian Hospital one block away.


I have blessedly forgotten the precise anniversary in May when my mother fell at 4:30 a.m. on her bedroom carpet and shattered her hip, and our lives.  An ambulance took her the few short blocks to the hospital, where we lingered in the torpid ER for 12 hours. (Caledonian has since been shuttered and lies alongside the park as a boarded-up ghost; its closing represents no great loss to modern medicine.) As the sun rose that awful morning, I glanced into the park and saw a lone young female jogger sprint past. In that moment, behind the thick hospital windows, I intuited that a prison was springing up invisibly around me. The jogger, now an emissary from a distant land of health and freedom, vanished down the South Lake Drive, and I turned to engage with my new life as a caregiver of a patient with fathomless physical and emotional needs that consumed us both for her remaining six years.

What is it about the water's edge that draws us when we're burdened with memory? Distraction and release, I guess. The goslings were much in evidence, already assuming an unpleasant goose-like shape despite their cloak of fuzz. 











A perfect yellow iris bloomed in the lakeside muck.











Now that the phragmites have grown tall again, the marshes along the southern periphery of the lake offer many sheltered cul-de-sacs in which homeless fellows or street people congregate, alone or in small groups, and stow their stuff. Perhaps one of them arranged this tableau befitting my flashbacks: a mighty fallen tree, its core a black void, holding up a naked mattress at the edge of a swamp.




Sitting awhile at the lake's edge, I tried to be present to the blessings that have replaced our burdens: growing daughter instead of declining mother, bicycles instead of wheelchairs, the park instead of the hospital room. Still, it is a sharp-edged consolation that rests on the absence of one you loved so much, as any caregiver knows. Even now, nine years after her death, regret and anger, pain and guilt can all flood back in an instant, and I still find myself searching for some mystical seal of approval that I really, truly did the best I could.

The park didn't fail me; as I turned for home, an angel arose from the depths in benediction.

Well, okay, it was these guys a moment later. But the point was taken. 

These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look...

          Emily Dickinson, Nature

Comments

[Miguel Angel Escobar]

This is a wonderful, evocative post. Thank you for sharing this part of your journey. Peace, Miguel