I am eighty years old and I still live with my mother.
She is ninety-eight years old.
This phrase is enough to stop people, not out of rudeness, but because most of us carry within us a silent map of what life is supposed to be like. On this card, a child grows up, marries, leaves home, raises his own children, takes care of a garden, buries his husband, reduces his house, perhaps settles near one of his children, plays cards on Thursdays, joins a walking group if the knees still hold. On this card, a mother becomes first a memory, then a photograph, then a story that we tell by sharing a pie. On this card, an eighty-year-old woman does not respond every morning to her ninety-eight-year-old mother who calls her from the back bedroom: Sarah, are you up? “as I did for twelve years.But the cards are drawn by people looking from afar, while life is lived up close, where sorrow, duty, love, fear and devotion merge until we don’t know more where one stops and the other begins.
Last year, when the census worker walked up the steps of our porch in our small town in Ohio, he looked at me, then at Mom, then at me again, as if the form he he was holding had made a mistake. It was a young man in his thirties, with a polite voice, who held his notebook close to him so that the wind would not carry away his papers. Standing on the porch, as the light of late September traced a pale gold line on the railing, he looked behind me, into the dark entryway where Mom sat in her chair by the living room window. Two white-haired widows in the same house of used shingles. Same mailbox. Same phone line. Same roof. Same chipped blue flower pot on the steps, which had survived three presidents,two dogs and a dozen winters in Ohio. He checked his form twice before asking, very politely, if he understood correctly.
I told him yes.
Then Mom, who was ninety-seven years old at the time and almost blind in one eye, leaned towards the screen door and said, “We’re both still here, young man. Write this exactly as I say. “
He laughed, and so did I, and for a brief moment it all seemed funny rather than unusual. Funny how certain truths become so after you’ve lived with them for so long that the strangeness loses its edge and simply becomes your own ordinary life. After he left, however, I stood on the porch for a long time looking at Maple Street and thinking about how strange life can seem from the outside when you don’t know the form of love inside. From the sidewalk, I guess it felt like a failure: I never really left home. As if life had made a curve on itself. As if old age had defeated me and taken me back to childhood, under my mother’s roof. But none of this sounded like childhood. Childhood is lived forward. It was something else.They were two women at the end of their lives, carrying what remained of a family between them, trying, quietly and without applause, to accompany each other home.
