Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

There were whole weeks in which she repeatedly and secretively escorted JoAnn and me, at different intervals, to a large mantel-like furniture piece situated at the end of the Expressions corridor. She would motion for us to come closer and would wordlessly open one of the drawers containing a mauve dinner napkin she must have taken from the kitchen. Lifting the napkin, she would indicate the space beneath it as if to say that this was where those things of value would be found; that should something happen to her, this was where we would find what she had left for us.

  The drawer was empty, except for a few clean tissues, but the gesture was pregnant with meaning. We remained her confidantes, the gesture told us; and she was still our mother-provider, our protector. “Por si acaso…”

  “In case something should happen to you.” I finish the sentence for her. She nods.

  Expressions. Maybe the naming of these elder facilities was not as commercially intended as I had suspected, for my mother’s wordless expressions eloquently articulated a complex web of emotion and body memory she carried inside her.

  I recall this especially on those days when we would return our mother to the dementia unit after a day’s excursion—maybe to the hot dog stand down the road or a few hours sitting outside under the shaded canopy of my sister’s patio. There was no evading the sense that she was being deposited like a package whose contents could be collected and returned. She no doubt felt the same as I caught the sigh of disappointment falling out of her when I pushed open the door to the pleasantly upholstered front room.

  For a long time, we would quickly steer her away from the door in the effort to ease the transition and to bar her from any sudden move to escape. But what was worse is that she eventually made no such move. She merely turned her narrow sweatered shoulders away from us (there was no real goodbye) and headed quietly down the hallway in the direction of some place not home. She had already forgotten the meaning of that spontaneous sigh and had moved on.

  On such days, when the heavy keyless door locked behind us, JoAnn and I swallowed hard, full buckets of tears. I visualized the galvanized metal ones, like the work buckets that held soapy water on the Saturday chore days of my childhood; like the tub in which I had once bathed my mother when prefabricated showers no longer suited her. It was just turning spring in San Gabriel and Alzheimer’s was a distant denied thought. Unashamed before her daughter, naked, she stepped in as delicate-toed as a heron.

  NOW AND ZEN

  When I finally came to accept the fact of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, it had put language to the loss of connection I had been experiencing from her for so long. Of course, one initially responds, Not my mother. At first, I had felt betrayed by the diagnosis; that Elvira would be denied a death with dignity. What I didn’t know at the time was that the illness would come to illuminate my mother’s spirit life, the ephemeral and the constant, in ways that the sleep of our mundane existence does not allow.

  My mother’s Alzheimer’s offered its witnesses a slow reconciliation with our beloved’s dying—the departure of the ego, of personality, of memory itself. When I can no longer remember my name … At some point, this final forgetting would happen to each and every one of us. I could only hope that in death, we are finally relieved of mattering so; not to our survivors, but to ourselves.

  As Elvira’s illness progressed, I began to experience her as my personal Zen teacher, observing her live her life in the perennial present. But her body continued to hold fast to the past. My father cried at the kindness of my mother’s gesture of instinctively tucking in the back of his shirttail. Did her body remember, although the heart had forgotten the gesture’s meaning? In the timelessness of my mother’s remaining months at Expressions, we watched her degenerate before our eyes. She became noticeably less present, did not respond to my touch the same way she had; she remembered no one’s name on her own. We were grateful that she could at least still recognize her husband, her daughters, her many relations.

  Spirit relatives now surrounded her. I watched them call her attention, her head turning away as if listening to a nearby conversation. They drew her in more compellingly than the middle-aged daughters who comforted her, the youth (her grandchildren and their mates) who visited, hopeful and kind. My niece, Erin, said it best: “She isn’t holding on to me any longer.” There was a sad freedom in the release.

  What I was witnessing in my mother and had registered intuitively is confirmed in science. If she lasted long enough, she would return to infancy. Some days she barely managed the skills of a two- or three-year-old. She could no longer dress herself. There was the day in which she placed excrement, like a child playing tea, on the plates of her sister residents. No one knew where she got it. “She’s been stashing it places,” the attendants suspected. Everyone, even the other elders, knew not to eat it. But none of her lady friends looked at her askance, for they were all children now.

  * * *

  With the celebration of my mother’s ninetieth birthday on the fifth of November 2004, Elvira had already spent a full year behind locked doors. I don’t remember one word from her that night, certainly not a full sentence. We sat in a small private dining room at the residence. Helium balloons were tied to the chairs circling the long table. My mother sported a plastic party hat, bowler-shaped and bright pink, with a band also dotted with party balloons printed in primary colors.

  In one photo of the event, my mother profiles the same Yaqui nose of her mother at ninety. It shadows the length of her face. The bowler tipped forward, she looks the part of an aging Charlie Chaplin, sad in that same melancholy way of the clown, powdered cheeks and red-lipped.

  But like the clown, just beneath the surface of her comic antics, in the beat between joke and laughter, my mother’s pretense falls. In the span of an hour and a half she was completely spent. Barely poking at her meal, she smiled for photographers: first with her three children, then with her husband, then with her sister and elder nieces, then just the menfolk, then just the womenfolk, then with the grandson, then finally her face collapsed into itself.

  “She’s tired,” my sister said. “Let’s take her back,” which meant to her usual spot in Expressions on the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV she never watched, where she would fitfully fall into sleep.

  An hour afterwards, the attendant would take her to her room to put on her flannel pajamas and, if the night went well, she would manage to get my mother to fall asleep in the twin bed with the comforter that was too heavy for her bone-thin legs and arms. Elvira would try to lift the blanket with the side of her thigh but the effort made her tired, weak, and sleepless. Forcing herself out of the bed, she would wander the halls until dawn, when she would again fall into the La-Z-Boy and sleep until breakfast.

  This was my mother’s life now, and as alien as it seemed to her daughters, there were whole days in which JoAnn and I concurred that she was sometimes happier there in her imagined world of household duties, caring for others, picking up the napkins they dropped and dumping the small metal trash cans of other people’s bathrooms, than in the enforced world of social relations.

  After the “party,” I return home to Oakland. Something had shifted for me during my last visit. I scan a photo I had taken of Elvira at another family gathering perhaps a year before. The portrait bears no trace of my mother’s anxious heart. Her eyebrows slightly arched, the expression is whimsical and forthright at once. She remains resolute, as fixed as the sculpted stone her aged face had come to resemble. I print out the photograph, find a frame for it and the courage to put it on my ancestor altar surrounded by my honored dead. The gesture, intuitively prompted, told me what I had begun to think of my mother: that she was daily becoming one of them.

  WHEN THEY LOSE THEIR MARBLES

  These are the gifts we daughter-lovers

  offer to one another.

  See our open hands.

  You hold your medicine—paintbrush and peyote.

  I, the writings my claw-hand scratches

  against the
broken pavement of my desire.

  Through the obsidian mirror of death, I saw myself stripped of the illusion of my separateness from the suffering of others. Celia’s eldest son, the troubled Maceo, nearing thirty, had returned to enter and disrupt our lives with a brooding disquiet. In him, I recognized the reflection of my own desperate attempts to control the women and children around me. He, with no other leverage than the volume of his voice, the threat of his fist, the guilt we women feel for the anguish of our sons.

  Inside the body of my own fears, I knew myself to be equally abusive. I observed my feeble attempts to arrange my home and family life—those troublesome beings who are my loved ones—compulsively posting kids’ pickup and delivery schedules, checking homework compliance like a prison guard, picking up small collections of lint from the rug as neurotically as I had as a child. Each day I told myself (and often Celia) that I was done fighting, worrying; desperately trying to ward off the worst-case scenarios of failing high school grades and unplanned pregnancies; of fast-food- and computer-game-addicted grandsons; of middle school truancy as a lifestyle prediction for my adopted familia.

  I knew, peering into the mirror-face of death, that I could no more control the adult lives of Celia’s children (nor how they managed their own children) than stop the progress of my mother’s disease. At times, Celia and I would sit at the breakfast table, Camerina now a high schooler and Rafa off to middle school leaving their bowls sticky with drying avena, and we could do nothing more than lament the losses between us. We got up, washed and dried the bowls, and continued with our day.

  * * *

  I was sweeping outside when I heard the commotion from the downstairs porch. Maceo’s voice was shaking and … livid.

  “I don’t know what you want!” he shouts.

  “Want what?” Celia asks, stepping out onto the porch to better calm her son.

  “When you die … I don’t know what you want for a service!”

  Earlier that day, Maceo had been helping Celia move some art items in a van, closely following her in his own car. He watched as she barely missed a head-on accident, swerving away just in time.

  “You could’ve gotten killed!” he snaps.

  I passed him on the porch on the pretext of putting away the broom. He glanced over at me bitterly. “You are nobody,” his look told me, still unreconciled with his mother’s lesbianism; blaming it for all the loss that he had suffered, convinced that it had relegated him to the fringes of the Native world.

  Beneath the masquerade of all that masculinity, Maceo was sensitive enough to know that losing Celia was everything. In a later conversation, he repeated, “Just tell me what you want!” It was clear that Maceo didn’t think that I had anything to say on the subject. Her death would be his to have. And I wondered—Am I any different? Don’t I believe that I somehow hold the rights to my mother’s passing? It occurred to me at that moment that Celia might prefer to offer herself over to her son in death than worry over the last rites/rights of our queer marriage. Oh, it is a marriage, but without contract. And as the gay politic of the day struggled for the legal right to marry, I tried to figure out, What’s blood got to do with it?

  Even before my mother’s illness, Celia often lamented the horror of eldercare in this country. “When I lose my marbles,” she’d joke, “just put a long rope around my waist and tie me to a tree out on a hillside somewhere,” more than half meaning it. Somehow, I’ve never had a problem imagining her tethered to a great cottonwood in the sierras of her Ódami Durango homeland, where she would finally be allowed to return, if only for those extended moments of conciencia before the earth finally swallows us whole.

  * * *

  It was true that Maceo had often served as a thorn in our relationship, especially in his younger years. And yet he and his young daughter, Cetanzi—whom Celia parents in his stead—represent what Celia fundamentally understands as pueblo. I know I cannot interrupt this. As she does not stand in the wake of my ancestors, I cannot stand in the rising river of hers.

  These are the words I do not say to my beloved’s face but know them to be speechlessly true in my heart. These, my own queer marriage vows:

  Through your son

  the one who gives you the deepest heartbreak,

  the one who into his thirties

  calls three and four times a day

  with a boy’s ansias,

  who cannot quite yet

  figure out how to pay a bill

  not quite

  how to manage a full month’s rent

  not quite

  how to get and keep a job

  whose heart and head

  ache from so much

  almost

  not quite

  and yet

  another daughter’s

  promise is born.

  For this one girl-child,

  who remains with us,

  is somehow marked differently.

  She who, barely two

  walks about

  with great ancestral knowing.

  And the world stops spinning for a moment

  and the world makes sense for a moment

  that ancestors may in fact come back

  to repair damages done.

  And I watch your heartbreak turn to hope,

  watch all other sentiment eclipsed

  by this great knowing

  that a pueblo can return

  through the body of a broken boy

  spitting out a grandmother spirit.

  We came together through loss, Celia and I. She, an orphan at five, the daughter of a long litany of dead relations. I, the daughter of familial abundance. We came together with loss on the horizon; for it is not a matter of numbers but of memory.

  I don’t know how far back to go, except to say conciencia was born at my mother’s breast; except to say as a child of god, I knew myself godless before I reached “the age of reason” in Catholic catechism terms; except to say that I am one among millions of delusional MexicanAmericans, who has pretended we immigrated to (and were not born of) these lands; except to say that my mother danced with Rita Hayworth in the nightclubs of Tijuana in the 1930s, and it was downhill after that—not downhill easy, but sliding on your nalgas down the rocky descent of dying dreams.

  In the last years of my mother’s life, I resigned her to a place that was not home so that she could remain close to my father, instead of her lesbian daughter, four hundred miles away. Now I wonder. I wonder if it was the right thing to do when blood matters, when blood required me to bring her home to die.

  PART IV

  How can I tell you this?… That this stub of … pencil that moves across the page of paper is not real, either, and that the truth lies on the other side of even these words.

  —Four Souls, LOUISE ERDRICH

  THE WISDOM OF DOLPHINS

  May 29, 2005.

  At my mother’s hospital bedside, I watch her dream in a drug-induced sleep/half sleep. I tell myself, Good, she is resting. Don’t know if it’s so; don’t know if the drugs help or hurt or if they snatch from her whatever conciencia endures. She sleeps openmouthed, sucking in the motionless hospital air. Her lungs are strong. Blood transfusion. IV drip for hydration. Busted hip repaired with plate and screws. I don’t know.

  On Memorial Day weekend, wandering, as always, through the corridor of Expressions, my mother falls and fractures her hip. After that there would be no more birthday parties, no more trips to the nearby hot dog stand or the taco joint down the road, no more afternoons spent before the fake fireplace of Expressions, no more postponement of inevitable questions and irreconcilable answers.

  The night before her surgery, JoAnn and I had sat with our mother in her hospital room. Fully rested from being forced to stay in bed, she was suddenly lucid and in good humor. Given her alertness, I ventured to tell her the truth: that she had fallen and broken her hip and that the doctors intended to fix it. Her lucidity was so remarkable that I also found myself sayi
ng that there was a risk that she might not come out of the surgery. She had earned this: to be told the whole truth, to have the chance to die “awake,” is how I thought of it. “Nunca se sabe,” I counsel, as the doctor had counseled us. This was the kind of language my mother understood best, where we offer up our fate to a universe we cannot control. You never know. Si dios quiere … if it is God’s will.

  “Entiendes, Mamá?” I asked, and she nodded yes, that she understood. But more than this, she knew, as JoAnn and I also knew, that this was really her deathbed farewell. For on that day my mother was fully coherent and she spent it embracing a long line of relatives who each got a chance (without admitting it) to say goodbye. Lifting my hips up onto the edge of the bed, I take her hand in mine, and drink in the etched beauty of her face. Her childlike expression is so utterly aware, a pure earnestness inside those liquid ash-colored eyes. She completely entrusts herself to me and to my sister. There is nothing more to lose.

  We replay for her all the gifts she had given us as our mother, as a sister, an auntie, and abuelita: her good counsel, her generous heart, her tireless labor for us as a familia. I thought of the Tibetan Buddhists’ prayer, “May I not die confused.” And that is really all we want for our beloveds and for ourselves, to not drown finally in a pool of fear, regret, and uncertainty.

  Without saying so, JoAnn and I vainly hoped that our mother would not survive the surgery. She looked good, everybody said … and happy. It was a good day to die. But she didn’t die and we don’t get to write the scripts, the happy endings, nor the perfect deathbed despedidas. That night, on the eve of my mother’s surgery, was the last time Elvira would ever be as present to us again. The doctor had warned, “It is often the beginning of the end. Once they break their hip, they don’t usually return to their former selves.”