The Rhythms We Keep Since My Mother’s Stroke

The slight din of the television on TVLand from her room made its way toward the kitchen where Curtis and I sat, trying to figure out how this was all going to go. How everything had changed.

Watching Daddy during the months between Mama’s first hospitalization, the rehabilitation facility merry-go-round, and finally coming home, I understood for the first time what it meant to live your partner’s rhythms.

This was the story: At age seventeen, Mama moved from her father’s house to Daddy’s. The focus had always been on Mama’s age and inexperience. I had never really considered that Daddy was only twenty when he married Mama, or that he too was not independent but had been living with his much older sister who lived across the street from Mama. Almost immediately at the pronouncement of Mama’s expectancy, Daddy swiftly dropped his classes at the University of South Carolina and joined the army.

We always focused on the fact of Mama having never lived alone, so I had never thought about Daddy not ever being a bachelor in the way that I found myself a bachelorette in a city six states away from any blood relatives. On phone calls, Mama trying to understand my life, would ask me:

“How do you get your groceries home?” I carried them.

“All the way up the stairs?” Yes.

“What happens when something breaks?” The super fixes it, or a friend.

“What if someone tries to break into your apartment?” Mama, I would laugh, for better or worse, my apartment doesn’t have a fire escape.

“Who carried the furniture into your apartment?” Movers.

“Who puts your AC in your window?” Me. Sometimes, I bribe a friend with a beer. I bribed Curtis to carry it up four flights of stairs when we were dating.

“But don’t you feel lonely? Being alone?” Mama, I feel independent.

She never understood. I know that’s why when things got bad, she never left us, even with all her threats. Love probably had something to do with it, too, a deep abiding, eternal love for Daddy, but also probably fear—of figuring out all this living by yourself. Fear of being alone.

Raising me, Daddy insisted on my self-sufficiency. He instructed that I “not be like [Mama].” He insisted that I know how to change the oil in a car, know how to change a tire. I was side-by-side with him when he changed the engine on his Buick Skylark, and side-by-side with him when he changed the timing belt on the Pontiac Grand Am.

Because Mama hated to drive on the interstate and that always inconvenienced Daddy on our long multi-state drives, when it was my turn to learn how to drive, my instructions were simple: buckle my seatbelt, and listen to his directions. Five minutes into my first time behind the wheel, I was on I-20 pushing the car to sixty-five MPH, feeling the road grind beneath the wheels.

In the hospital, Daddy slept most of the nights next to Mama’s hospital bed because we really, truly, did not know what was going to be what. He’d come home, throw his clothes around, shower, and head back out to work, or back to the hospital. During those days he was always out of the house before I woke up, and generally in the house after I went to sleep. This is not new. Growing up, and still small enough to be carried, I intentionally fell asleep anywhere not my bed knowing Daddy would come home, do a sweep of the house turning off all the nightlights, and gather me and put me into bed.

When she made it home and I visited without Curtis, I found my sleep on the couch in the living room because my room became a storage room as soon as I left for college. Mama lives in the third bedroom in her hospital bed, and Daddy has the master bedroom, alone.

Each visit to South Carolina before Mama came home from the hospital though, I’d come to find Daddy locked in his own type of purgatory. In the absence of Mama, the house slowly morphed into a middle-aged bachelor pad. At fifty-seven, Daddy was a bachelor for the first time in his life. Sure, there were still traces of Mama and her home daycare around the house in the early days post-stroke, but these remnants only served to amplify my father’s stasis. Two months after Mama went to the hospital because she fell and her face was drooping, the calendar on the master bedroom was still open to February 2016. The last time Mama flipped the calendar. She cared about things. Like time. Daddy calls me, or I call him—we spoke almost every day—and he reports, “You know, I wake up in the morning, late, because I realize I don’t know what time it is. Your mother was the one to wake me up, because she was always up early with the kids coming in for daycare.” Too, he hadn’t gone grocery shopping because Mama wasn’t there to ask him to run pick up this, pick up that.

Her rhythm kept his rhythm. When she would rise and begin to make breakfast for the children, he knew he had about two hours before he had to go to work. That was how he told time, against the movement of the other body in the house. Her rhythm kept his rhythm. If Mama was reading her Bible in her satin slip with the television tuned to the Bible Television Network, he knew it was Sunday. If dishes were clinking around in the sink, the water running in the bathroom, and Mr. Clean wafting in the air, Daddy knew it was Saturday.

He hadn’t gone grocery shopping because Mama wasn’t there to ask him to run pick up this, pick up that. Her rhythm kept his rhythm.

I knew this dance. Curtis clocks in for work two nights a week at midnight, which means he leaves our apartment at 11:30 p.m. He gets up, gets dressed, rummages around the house and it is dark outside. We already had dinner. Without looking, I know it is nearing 11 p.m. Like an internalized rhythm, my body starts to shut down, prepare for bed. When I worked full time and left the house at the same time every morning, Curtis knew when he should wake up—he had a few sleeps left after I kissed him goodbye for the day. His rhythm keeps my rhythm, and so it goes.

These days, though, Daddy claims he doesn’t seem to know up from down or where Mama kept the paperwork for their taxes. It was April now, nearing the deadline, and Daddy was scrambling to find the little slips of paper from the parents that confirmed her services and their payment.

My family rhythm brought me back every three weeks to pizza boxes, KFC, unopened deli turkey and loaves of bread stuffed into the fridge. A box of Nilla wafers. A box of Zebra Cakes. Swiss Rolls. Froot Loops on top of the fridge. Gallons of sweet tea. Half gallons of lemonade. I think it was because he never expected to make it this far alive, beyond Mama in some way. Daddy never expected to have to find ways to care for himself because, like the rest of us, we knew the fate of the men of our family: men leave first, women remain behind. Women always outlived the men. This is not to say that Daddy was not also in danger of leaving, right now. Theirs is the most fragile ecosystem and each day I wait for one of the two shoes to drop.

I remind Daddy that he was the one with diabetes first, not Mama, and that he should be careful how he’s eating and he remarks smartly it’s a miracle he remembers to eat anything at all. It was Mama that was always fussy about eating and the time to eat, and so he would sit down for a meal with her. Now he’s lucky if he can grab a snatch of chicken leg or even—he’d laugh—make sure he has clean underwear for the day before he’s off to the next thing he has to take care of.

Maybe none of us knew how much Mama did until she didn’t do it anymore.

We are in stage one of mapping the voids Mama has left in our lives like a chalk outline of a body. Still, I keep having to remind myself she is not dead. She is very much still breathing with us. But in New York it is easy to slip into an internal narrative: Mama is gone. Forever. Usually, that internal voice comes when I would try to reach for the phone to call her. In the small moments when I recalled some of the unfinished conversations, things I wanted to follow up on. Could she visit us again in New York City in March for her birthday? My nephew, the one she thought was so cute as he was running around at our feet at our wedding, was five now and cooking his own waffles and reading three grade levels above normal. She would love these reports. Mama, how I knew her in my life, is gone. And now, the things about which I rolled my eyes, I find overly sentimental. Each time I prepare to fly anywhere, I ask no one in particular: “Who will pray over me? Who will ask God for traveling mercies?”

It really is the little things that do you in—the things you don’t think would are the wrenches come to crack open your ribcage. The first Thanksgiving Curtis joined the Dameron dinner table, Mama didn’t know what to do with a “real vegetarian.” (“Lana, he don’t eat fish?”) The night before the big feast, Daddy had a crab boil and we cracked blue crabs on large metal sheet trays while the turkey roasted in the oven. Daddy knew I liked crabs, that I didn’t eat them almost anywhere else, so he could do something for me that my husband would never be able to: make a pot of crabs. Meanwhile, Mama tried so hard to figure out how to feed her new son. We arrived to the house that Wednesday to deviled eggs and chocolate fondue. Curtis, in his way, made due and asked if they had green beans or maybe he could just make a salad to go with it, and we could all eat the fondue as dessert.

Then it was off to cooking. We had settled into this new tradition. The earlier Thanksgivings spent away from home, Mama called despondent because they weren’t going to have homemade collard greens and were forced to order from Lizard’s Thicket.

“No one would wash and cut them for me this year, Lana.” She’d lament.

But when Curtis and I started making our way South for Thanksgiving, Mama would call: “I picked up two big bunches of collards for y’all. They are waiting for your wash and cut!” The rhythm was this: Curtis and I would finish our Wednesday dinner—me with my blue crabs and he with something we knew better now to prepare ourselves—and then set up the process for washing and cleaning and cutting two grocery bags full of collard greens. Of course, Mama’s measurement of “bunch” was a full-blown bag.

We stayed up soaking and plunging, cutting, and then soaking and cutting. This is how we cooked. Together. Mama dozed in and out of sleep, chiming in to make sure we remembered the turkey necks for her batch, and I’d look through their seasoning cabinet to make Curtis’ vegetarian version as well. We’d set them up to cook in the crockpots overnight, while I went off to prepare the macaroni and cheese, green beans (meat and meatless) and prepped the sweet potatoes for Mama’s candied yams, which were actually my father’s mother’s recipe. So many years of food preparation, so many homages to those here and no longer.

After three Thanksgivings, Mama finally tried the vegetarian collards and declared: “They taste about as good as the regular ones!” Curtis and I laughed.

The new first Thanksgiving, this one post-Mama’s stroke, we came down as we usually did, but without Mama’s pronouncement. There was no crab boil. We were all just happy Mama made it this long—nine months and yes we still counted each day—and that she was home. In the back bedroom in her rented hospital bed, every few minutes the air mattress under her body hissed as it redistributed the air so to stave off bedsores.

The slight din of the television on TVLand from her room made its way toward the kitchen where Curtis and I sat, trying to figure out how this was all going to go. How everything had changed.

Out of nowhere, I burst into tears. Curtis, equally surprised, moved in and talked low so Mama couldn’t hear us. What was wrong? I had felt this seismic shift at my core. And then I felt so ashamed at how something that would be perceived as so little had become monstrous and moved me so.

So many years of food preparation, so many homages to those here and no longer.

“I don’t even know where Mama got the collard greens,” I cried into his chest. He was holding me still, rubbing my back. He reached in his back pocket for his handkerchief and I wiped my nose. This new rhythm had become routine over the last nine months. “Mama was the one to pick up and pick out the collards and now she’s back there in the room and she can’t even tell me where to go look for them!”

My hysteria sent Curtis to Daddy to see if he might have any idea where Mama might have got the collards and Daddy knew! He went out to the farm stand on North Main Street and picked them up. Two white grocery bags of collard greens. So there was some semblance of equilibrium again.

The next task before me was to orchestrate cleaning out Daddy’s bachelor pad, moving his work tools and piled up mail out of the dining room so that we could sit down at the table for the real meal. The last nine months, we ate from entertainment trays in our laps, or standing up at the counter. As we started gathering his things, Sissy floated in and out that year and insisted we not try and clear the dining room but just every-man-for-himself it out in the living room, how we had been doing. Eat as the spirit moves us.

“It’s not ever going to be normal,” she offered.

I knew it. I refused, still. I was just trying to hold on to one damned thing, just keep one constant in my life at this point: Thanksgiving Dinner with all the fixings. I pushed back and promised we’d get everything together.

“I project-manage the shit out of my jobs. I got this,” I said. “I’ll finish cooking dinner, having cut and cleaned these greens, and we’ll be ready to eat at the table.”

Eventually, we had our spread: turkey, turkey-neck collard greens, vegetarian collard greens, dressing with turkey giblets, vegetarian dressing, turkey-neck green beans, vegetarian green beans, macaroni and cheese, candied yams. Always too much. Always just enough. I had bought for Mama three slices of cured ham and pineapple—another favorite dish, second only to collards. I fried up the two small pieces and drizzled with honey, and topped with the pineapple garnish and set it on the counter with the rest of the spread. We found the apple placemats that Curtis and I picked out for Mama some Christmases past. We gathered the best plates and forks. I made spaces for five seats: me, Daddy, Sissy, Curtis, and Mama.

Instead, the four of us pulled our chairs up to the table. Daddy was too tired to gather Mama out of bed, swinging her into the wheelchair, wheeling her up to the table, and then trying to feed her. He offered that we eat first, then we can bring Mama a plate to her room. This didn’t match my vision, but by this point, I was out of fight. In the small silence of what-to-do-next my core shook and a tidal wave of grief moved from my stomach to my eyes.

“Who is going to bless the food?” I asked. None of us were pious enough for the task to be taken as serious as Mama. We looked around. Waited. Curtis, agnostic like Daddy, but the calmest among us, reached out his hands motioning for us to gather each other, and said a grace that was sufficient.

The food was the same, and the collard greens turned out alright enough. And those of us who could, sat and ate at the dining table like any other Thanksgiving. But the hole was so obvious. We looked down our plates until we were done, barely anyone lingered. No one went back for seconds. We finished the one plate and then we pushed back from the table. We were done. The whole time, I kept glancing up towards the back of the house, wishing, expecting Mama to walk to the table and sit at the place I had cleared for her.