Mother and Child

Mother and Child

“Just let go,” she said. My fingers slipped from her hand.

I reached to hold her hand in mine again. She lifted it gently like it was made of fine porcelain that would shatter in an instant if I squeeze too hard. She turned to me, the light illuminating her face in such an angelic halo that I almost forget where we were. Then she smiled. It’s the smile she would give me when my world was falling apart, and she wanted to calm my spirit. But I know her heart. The glow of the hospital fluorescent bulbs could hide the pools of tears in her eyes. She tried to blink them away, leaving droplets on her lashes that caught the light like tiny stars gathering around her eyes. Still, they would not be stopped. One by one, the tears escaped her lashes and trailed down her face. Wincing and turning away, she pretended not to cry. Per our unspoken agreement, I pretended not to see. Her gaze drifted towards the window. The moon filled the whole sky with its luminescent beauty tonight. Just as the chaos in the room was progressing, silence fell over us both.

We blink. And then—in a second—I am with her, sharing her mind, her thoughts, her heart as if we are one. Instead of looking at the moon, we are the moon looking at us. Outside of ourselves, we are watching us and all the "when”s of us. Leaving the present in the past, for now, we left the hospital window for a time, suspended in time.

Ginny had just buried her husband, Sam, after cancer took him far too young. Now a one-income household, she had to let the house she shared with her husband go and move into a small studio apartment with her daughter, Katie, who was just seven at the time. With the moonlight behind us, we saw the young mother pull out the sleeper sofa among the half-unpacked boxes scattered around the small apartment. Turning so her daughter would not see her cry, she crawled in bed, and the little one followed.

Katie curled up in the small spoon her mother made with the bend of her legs and turn of her body. I had never realized how young the mother was at the time. Her hair was still dark, almost raven with just slight touches of auburn. She was still carded when buying alcohol, which was rare, and her face would blend in with any college freshman class. She always did look a little younger than she was. Her eyes were her father’s, green with sable, long lashes. And her frame was long. Her wide pants and her husband’s jersey hung loosely from limbs that had lost weight from not eating due to stress and distractions.

She braided her hair, and then Ginny lay the blanket over her tiny, sleepy one. She remembered the poem that grounded her throughout her husband's illness, and as he passed from this world into the next: "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne. It had become her mantra.

Sam began to say it first. When his hair was gone, and his body was two-thirds of its size, he spent his time reading the classics of literature. But there was something about Donne's words that stayed with him. Soon, he didn't need the book in front of him to recite the words. He would stare into Ginny's eyes and speak of a love that knew no time or distance. And then, as he caught the tear that fell from her eye, he spoke of death, not as an ending, but merely a doorway.

“Ginny,” he would say. “I have loved you more in one lifetime than most people get to do in ten. And our daughter is loved just as much.”

She grabbed his hand.

“It’s simply a doorway, a pause, to where the other feet must run.”

Ginny turned her head slightly, remembering her husband’s words just hours before he left her in this world as he passed on to the next. She looked down at her daughter and brushed the hair from Katie's eyes. Her daughter's little body was tucked into a ball.

I smile and turn to her beside me. She looks at me with sweet, sad eyes. Looking through this window of time. We live this memory together. We feel and think both Katie and Ginny as if their life-force is streaming through us.

Ginny spoke softly, "Okay, pumpkin, I'm going to read you a poem. This is my faaavooorite. It’s by John Donne.

The little one stared up at her. “Read? But you don’t have a book.”

Ginny paused for a moment to make a memory in her mind and heart of the image of her daughter curled up just like this. Her hair had a bit more red in it than Ginny's. It lay in pieces, fanned out on the pillow like silken ribbons turning and twisting around each other. Katie always had flyaway hairs around her forehead that she brushed away with her little fingers just before she spoke. Then she would blink exactly twice, bringing attention to her father's eyes, which were a deep brown. Tonight, she also wore one of her father's shirts, a T-shirt that fell to her ankles. Lately, it was her favorite thing to sleep in. Not wanting to deny her daughter the connection, Ginny left her daughter in the oversized shirt. She looked under the blanket at the little feet peeking out past the white cotton shirt.

Ginny smiled, brushed back the fly-aways, and answered, “You’re right. I don’t. Sometimes, when you love a story or poem so much, you learn it by heart. It's just like you remember how some of your favorite stories go, like ‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘Cinderella.’ Only, for a poem, it's really important to get every word juuust riiiight. This one was your daddy’s favorite too. So we both know it by heart.”

“You mean he knew it by heart.” Katie got a little sad when she said that.

"No, honey. Daddy's watching over us. And somewhere, he is reading this poem in his heart."

Katie smiled. "Well, then I want to know it by heart too."

Katie turned on her side, folding her arms into her chest like a cocoon.

“Okay then, Katie. Let me start teaching you.

As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, ‘The breath goes now,’ and some say, ‘No,”

Katie was just listening to the sound of her Mom's voice. She heard "virtue," and "men passing." But she didn't know what "passing" meant. "Whisper" and "breath" made her think it was some sort of game of hide-and-seek you play in the clouds. She was quiet for a little. Her eyes began to blink, as if they were trying to decide between wake or slumber.

Finally, Katie asked, “Is the man telling someone a secret?”

"Not exactly," Ginny told her as her fingers lightly combed through Katie's hair.

“Then what game are the men playing?”

“They were good men. So they are telling their ghosts to go to heaven.”

Katie was very sleepy now. She turned to face her mother and tucked herself back into a ball as she softly declared, “They spoke to ghosts? Nobody speaks to ghosts”—she yawned—"silly men.”

Within a few moments, Katie fell into a deep slumber. Ginny continued to comb through Katie's locks of hair. She twisted each piece into individual curls, laying them down one by one as if she were arranging them for a picture. She looked around the room and felt the emptiness of all she had lost: her husband, their home, and their life together. A tear fell. She looked down and her daughter and caught the teardrop before it disturbed the peaceful slumber of the happiness she had left, her precious daughter.

Hand in hand, we turn only to trip on Venus. She smiles and brush a tear from her cheek. Years have passed and Katie is growing fast.

Ginny held down two jobs to pay bills. Working weekends and weird hours, she would often be off when Katie was in school. One day, she was picking up Katie's dirty clothes when a letter dropped out of her jeans. She opened it to find a letter to Sam, Katies father.

Dear Dad,

I'm 13 today. Mom's working. All I have is this cake she left me. And you're not here. I know I'm not supposed to say this. But I hate you for dying. I'm mad at you because Mom has to work so hard that she doesn't have time to take care of herself or me. I'm so mad at you because you weren't here to teach me how to ride my bike or fish or throw a ball. I learned how to do all those things anyway. But you should have been here anyway. You won't teach me to drive or grill my prom date-- if I have a prom date. You're going to miss my high school graduation and college graduation. And I know everyone says that you're here in spirit, but I don't know that. I don't feel that.

Mom cries dad. She cries when she thinks I don't hear. And when she cries, she tries to stop herself mumbling the lines from John Donne's poem:

So let us melt, and make no noise, 

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; 

'Twere profanation of our joys 

   To tell the laity our love. 

What does that even mean! She says it again and again until she stops crying altogether. I hate that you left her and broke her heart. I hate that you left me all alone! I hate that you are not going to be here for all the wonderful and important moments in my life. And worse, I hate that you're not going to help me through the bad ones.

--I'm sorry Dad. I don't really mean it. I mean. I hope I don't. But if Mom says those lines because she thinks you don't want her to cry, does that mean I'm not allowed to either?

Love,

Katie

Ginny simply took the letter into the kitchen and lay it on the table. When Katie came home, she stopped dead in the middle of the room, afraid her mother would be upset with her. She found something else altogether.

"Katie, honey, sit down."

"Mom," Katie said, pleading before she had time to gauge her mother expression of compassion. "I didn't mean it. I was just so sad and angry—"

"It's okay. I want to show you something."

"Mom," Katie said, pleading before she had time to gauge her mother's expression of compassion.

"What's that, Mom?" Katie said as she sat down on the seat next to her mother.

"Just wait." Ginny drew a circle around the dot and then a circle around that and another one. On those circles, she put a progression of dots as well. "Do you know what these are?"

"Evidence that there are no artists in our family?" Katie smiled.

"You have your father's smart ass," Ginny said, playfully pushing Katie's head. "No. Read the next lines of the poem."

So Katie read:

"Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, 

   Men reckon what it did, and meant; 

But trepidation of the spheres, 

   Though greater far, is innocent."

She looked up at her mother and said, "I don't get it?"

"Back in John Donne's time, they believed that all the heavens revolved around the Earth"—she looked over at her Katie—"much the same way you think the world revolves around you."

"I most certainly do not think"­—

"I'm just teasing you." Ginny pointed to the paper again. "Now seriously, look how the first is the Moon, then Vercury, Venus, then the Sun."

"So the Sun is in the middle of all this rotating?"

"It was wrong. But it's how he saw things. Anyway, that's not the point. In the stanza he says how all these things like earthquakes and volcanos happen. People get hurt and die so they try to figure out what has caused it. But that's just a little, tiny movement that causes all that hurt. Above all that are these great spheres that spin around us, yet they make no noise. They cause no harm. Their movement is innocent.

"And the next stanza:

Dull sublunary lovers' love 

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit 

Absence, because it doth remove 

   Those things which elemented it. 

"Sublunary?" Katie asked. "Luna, like the moon?"

"Yes," Ginny said. "Those people who have a love anchored to the Earth, below the moon, must see each other. For them, to see is to love."

Katie paused for a moment. She looked at the crumbled letter she wrote to her father and then she looked at her mom. Without being asked, she began the next stanza, the next lesson:

"But we by a love so much refined, 

   That ourselves know not what it is,"

Ginny joined her for the last two lines:

"Inter-assured of the mind, 

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss."

Mother found her daughter's hand and lifted Katie's chin so she was staring into her eyes. "You listen to me, Katherine. I miss your father every day. But our love is not bound to this world. It floats up there in the heavens, leaping from one sphere to the other, and playing hide and seek with the stars. I do not need him here to talk to him every day. I do not need him here to feel the warmth of his love. He's here"—Ginny places her hand over her own heart—"and he's here." She places the other hand on her daughter's heart.

Katie's mind played faint memories of her daddy tucking her in, watching cartoons. But she also remembered him sick, thin, dying. So young and so long ago, they mixed together until she didn't know what were her memories or what were barrowed memories from other people telling her things, showing her pictures. Again, she looked at her crumbled letter of anger and regret. Tears began to pool in her eyes.

Ginny cradled her daughter's cheek. "It's okay, honey."So young and so long ago, they mixed together until she didn't know what were her memories or what were borrowed memories from other people telling her things, showing her pictures.

"I didn't mean it, Mom." Katie fell into her mother's embrace. "I swear I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." She broke out into a full cry.

"It's okay honey. Our love for you is up there among the spheres too."

Just as Valediction had always been her gentle guide as Katie grew, so would it be on this journey. We look out in the heavens to see Donne's ptolemaic's universe and the planets dancing in their orbits around us.

As we drift away from mother and child falling asleep in each other’s arms, she holds me close. And I feel the wedding ring that she never took off even after all these years. Funny how it's always been there, but I never really noticed it. But I suppose there are times she didn't realize how much she still belongs to him, how much space he still occupies in her heart. Sometimes the ring is there even when it's not there.

We softly land on Jupiter. The Great Red Spot swirled around us. We were always standing there, it seemed. The crimson gasses move like waves over our feet. The sea of pastel hues stretches out in front of us with no end to the ethereal beauty in sight. And while we cannot feel any solid floor or rock on which we stood, we feel no fear of sinking into the celestial giant.

We turn to the left to see Katie at fourteen. They have moved into the house on Carey Street a few years earlier. There was no dishwasher, so they cleared the table and washed the dishes together at night. On this night, Ginny was reciting Donne’s poem again with Katie. She picked up a dirty glass and soaped it as she continued to another stanza,

“Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion. Like gold to airy thinness beat.”

Ginny rinsed the glass and placed it on the rack.

“Do You know what that means, Katie?” Ginny said as she pulled a plate from the dirty dishes and slipped it under the suds of the wash sink. She tilted her head, turning her left ear towards her daughter to await her response.

Katie picked up the last dish from the kitchen table, a bowl of broccoli her mother always cooked, but she never ate herself. She scraped the left-overs into the trash, because she didn't want any chance to see the same vegetable on the table the next day.

Afterward, she took the dish out to her mom, finally answering, “It means Johnny-boy was smoking some preeety good stuff, if you know what I mean.” Katie picked up the dishtowel. “And it’s KATE now, Mom. I’m not five anymore.” Katie turned to Ginny and stood with her hand on her hip as if to accentuate the curves of a young woman's body.

Ginny couldn’t help but laugh a little. “No, you’re not five. I will forever see you as four.”

Katie wasn’t amused.

But there was truth in Ginny’s statement. No matter how old Katie had grown, Ginny’s dreams of her had her frozen at four. Perhaps it was a mother’s need to always keep her safe and happy. Or maybe it was because at four, Katie had both parents. But whatever the reason, Ginny’s unconscious kept her at that age of innocence. But today wasn’t about preserving that innocence. It was about something else entirely.

Ginny put down her chores and dried her hands. She turned her daughter’s head, so she was looking straight at her. "Listen, Kate." Ginny became very serious as she gently brushed Kate's hair behind her ear.

“Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion. Like gold to airy thinness beat.

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“It means I am here”—Ginny put her hand on Kate’s heart—“whether you’re Katie or Kate. No matter how old you are or how far apart we are. We are mother and daughter. The bond between us stretches and expands like a sheet of gold over time, space, and distance. A mother’s love for her child can never be broken.”

Tones of misty hues of the Red Spot begin to swirl in tiny circles around our feet. They gather until they form one whirlwind that travels up from our knees to our chests. I feel a surge of energy as it moves around us, through us, as if we are apart of it or it is a part of us. She turns to me and brushes my hair behind my ear. The ring on her finger falls to our feet. As it hits the Great Red Spot, the swirls turn to gold. It stretches out like a never-ending sheet of gold. As the gold expands, we pull apart. At least, I think we pull apart. I can feel our hands lose touch. But when I look down, I still see her holding my hand, even though I cannot see her standing beside me. My heart breaks in half, feeling it has lost the person who has shared so much of my happiness. But just when I lose all hope and begin to weep, she catches my tear before it falls. I could not see her presence. But I could feel her love.

As our journey swept us off Jupiter, we were reunited as the star lights guided us to our next destination. In a moment, we turned and glided in until we were together again on Neptune. We looked at each other, and I just grinned. Neptune, or Poseidon in Greek mythology, was my favorite God. As a child, Katie loved him because he looked like Ariel's Dad. As a young teenager, and reading Percy Jackson, he was her favorite because she concluded he was, as she put it, "the hottest of the Gods." It wasn’t until high school and college that her love for all of Antiquity blossomed, including the Greek Gods. Poseidon's place as her favorite still held, due to his stories and his dominion over the seas. I glanced over to see her smiling. She remembered the preference of the God with triton. She even wore an evil smirk when we got there.

Kate was at the kitchen table with a tablet and pen. "Passport. Check. Driver's license. Check. Wallet. Check. Credit Card? Wait, let me see." She opened her wallet and started pulling out every card that was in there. Her hair was in a ponytail that reached almost to her waist. She was wearing short pajamas, glasses, and had two pens in her hair.

Ginny came in from the living room. She was older now with greying hair, and fine lines that had finally just started to appear at the corners of her eyes. Her daughter was twenty-two and had just graduated from college. But as she looked at Kate obsessively unpacking the bags she just packed, Ginny was beginning to feel like Kate was behaving a little too obsessive with her checklist.

“How many times are you going to do that, Kate?”

“I’m missing something. I know it.”

“No. No, you're not. You have all the clean underwear you could possibly need. And besides, they do have washer machines where you’re going.”

“Nope. It’s not that. I’m missing my credit card. Can’t go without that. I’ll have to get a new one. Can’t go until they send it to me.”

Ginny picked up Kate’s wallet and pulled out the exact card that Kate was searching for.

“Oh, sure. I knew it was there.” She smiled, took out her ponytail, and went to bed.

Ginny knew they had waited Kate's whole life for what was coming the next day. Ginny had pulled back the bowstring as far as she could. It was time to let the arrow fly. But Kate had gotten clingy the last few weeks at home. A couple times, she even fell asleep in Ginny's room. The graduate looked up natural disasters that had occurred where she was going to move on more than one occasion. She even went so far as to make a list of major crimes. Ginny could tell that Kate was looking for any reason to stay close to home. She didn't want to leave her mother all alone, and she was afraid of the next step in life. Yes, it's easy to say you want to travel and chase your dream. But it's different when your bags and backed the airport is a day away.

Ginny woke to the sound of the television playing in the living room. She turned to look at her phone. It was four o’clock in the morning. As she walked downstairs, she saw Kate staring straight ahead at the kitchen chair, sitting in front of her. Her face looked blank, oblivious that her mother had walked into the room.

Ginny walked closer. She saw that Kate was looking at her degree in history, her ticket to Italy, and the fellowship that was her reason for going. She seemed almost hypnotized at the three things in front of her. Ginny sat down next to her and put her arm around her. Like old times, Kate just rested her head on her mother's lap and let herself be seven years old again.

Ginny began “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” once again, lightly combing through her daughter's hair, arranging the locks like a fan as if she were creating a picture. Just before she recited the last stanza, she rested her hand on Kate’s forehead. And then she said softly, slowly,

“Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like the other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.”

Ginny paused, tilted her head. And waited for her daughter’s response.

Kate sat up and looked at her mother. Her eyebrows raised and furrowed in the middle.

"What, Kate?" Ginny asked.

“I’m the other foot, aren’t I?”

Ginny just smiled and held Kate’s hand for reassurance. “Great poetry reveals its wisdom when you need it.”

“But—”

“But nothing.” Ginny placed her hand on Kate’s cheek. “I did not make you to keep you still. Go.”

I felt her hand on my cheek as time and space spun around us. Her eyes staring into my eyes staring into hers like forever-mirrors, a heart within a heart, a soul within a soul. A light shined around us. It's the moon, and we are back at the hospital looking through the window at ourselves and everyone else. If anyone was moving, it is too slow to notice. We just turn and look at each other. For the first time since we start our journey, she speaks to me,

“As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, ‘The breath goes now,’ and some say, ‘No,’

‘Do you remember, Katie?” She said softly, almost like a whisper.

Her words lingered in the air, dancing like fireflies around us. I follow them one by one. “Whisper.” “Virtuous." "Breath." They flitter in front of me trying to catch my full attention. “What game are they playing?”

“Pay attention, Kate.”

My grown-up name.

“As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, ‘The breath goes now,’ and some say, ‘No,’

Do you remember?”

“I remember almost all of it, Mom. But we always skipped that part. Ever since I was little.”

“Not today, Kate. Now think. As virtuous men pass mildly away… why?”

“Because they were good?”

“And?”

“Because they were loved?”

“Not quite…” she says as she put her hands on my shoulders.

I stare into her eyes. I see the young mother turning her head away to stay strong for her daughter, even though her heart is breaking every day. I look down and see a gold band worn thirty years after her husband was buried. And I see a mother who spent her life giving all her life to her daughter. I see love given, not taken. Poetry. Truly great poetry reveals its wisdom in its own time.

“No, Mom. It was because THEY loved. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, Kathrine.”

She rests her hand on the side of my cheek, leans in, and kisses me softly. I bury my face in her soft, salt-and-pepper hair.

“As virtuous men pass mildly away,” she whispers, brushing the hair behind my ear.

“.... and whisper to their souls to go.”

So I just let go.

At first, I feel my body float. Just when I think I have hit the floor, I break through it, as if I am crashing through sugar glass. It breaks in such a sweet cloud of candy and dust that I fall painlessly into the cradle of arms my heart remembers from long ago. And just as if I am waking from a long sleep, I find myself staring into mirror images of my own eyes. Cradled by my father’s embrace, I fall into heaven.

She collapsed when the placenta pulled away. That’s what the doctors told me. As her hand left mine, the blood spilled onto the floor, pooling around her. It spread out in all directions until she lay on a sheet of red that seemed to stretch out forever. A team of people in scrubs and white coats piled in around her, trying to stop the bleeding. But I knew before her hand dropped from mine that there was nothing they could do. I knew before her body began to fall that my daughter was not coming back to this world. Somehow, like an echo in the back of mind, I knew. Sam prepared me for this day back when he whispered "Valediction" to me all those years.

My husband told me what was to come when he said his farewells to me in the Spirit realm. He recited Donne’s poem to me to help me help her to say goodbye. The day she told me she was expecting, the echo in my head grew louder and I remembered what Sam had said, "the other feet." Katie was not going to be with me much longer. All these years of reciting Sam's favorite poem had prepared her to say goodbye. She didn’t need to say goodbye to me. I know I will see her again. She needed to release her spirit from this world. She needed to say goodbye to her.

Kate named her daughter Samantha after her daddy. All the time, she felt her own little one move inside her belly, she would call her Sammy for short, and then she would recite Donne's poem.

She told me once, “I’m starting this one early.”

I just smiled. Just like I hoped, Kate had learned every line, every word, even every pause exactly how I had taught her.

When she finally began labor, and we rushed to the hospital, she saw my tears. But what she didn't know was that my tears were bitter and sweet. I knew it was time. And I knew that I would have to send her home to her father. With her last breath, she brought that little girl into this world. A mother’s love can stretch across time, space, and distance. I knew she loved Sammy enough to trust that.

In the end, my daughter loved. She loved enough for ten lifetimes.And it was because she loved that so well that she could whisper to her soul to go.