This year, I started teaching a writing group at a nursing home. The first day of our group, I sat down with a table full of elderly women who had parked their walkers nearby. I started off light:
Me: I had no idea this would be a group of all women! Where did all of the men go?
93-year-old woman: They're all dead. We outlived them.
Laughter ensued.
Yesterday, I had our April meeting. A woman I will call "Judy" showed up again, mostly because I bumped into her on the way to the meeting room and asked her if she was coming. She clearly hadn't intended to but she pushed her little walker in front of me and off we went.
Judy is in her eighties; her short-term memory is weak. But she told me a story yesterday that I want to write down so that I never forget it.
Judy was in her senior year of college. (She attended night school and worked all day because she could only take business management courses if she attended at night. Women were not welcome into the business classes during the day.) Her mother was very ill and Judy knew that her mother wouldn't live to see her graduate from college.
Judy went to visit her mother. She had written a poem for her mom -- she remembers bits and pieces of the poem still to this day -- and she wanted to share it with her mother before she died. However, Judy's two sisters refused to let her share the poem with her mother. They told Judy that if she shared the poem, their mother would know that she was dying and that they knew it, too. Judy's sisters wanted their mother to be ignorant of this fact. Judy wanted to face it head on.
Judy told me that at some point, she snuck past her sisters and read her mother the poem. Her mother loved it. Judy's smile radiated as she told me about how much her mother loved that poem.
I have been thinking about Judy's story ever since. As I continue to write my novel about the complexities of truth -- the challenges involved in revealing it, and the wave of pain-healing-pain-healing it can activate -- I was particularly moved by Judy's story.
I don't fault her sisters for wanting to protect someone they love, for wanting to hide the painful truth and spare their mother additional pain. I trust that Judy's sisters believed that sometimes, hiding the truth is better for everyone. But I'm like Judy, and have been long before cancer made me face my own mortality. I believe that we all have to start with the truth, as painful as it may be.
I'd imagine that it was devastatingly hard for Judy's mother to know that Judy was aware of her impending loss. A mother's knowledge of her child's pain; damn, it's hard. But the pretending -- the lies that her other daughters told her -- I'd bet that they never really made their mother feel any better. And that's why I admire Judy so much. She faced the truth and shared her love by sneaking in to read that poem. The love-filled pain felt by mother and daughter must have been indescribable, and, at the time, it may have been easier for Judy's sisters to avoid parts of it. But as Judy told me this story, as she recounted how much that poem meant to her mother and even recited parts of her poem to me, I didn't see pain. I saw pride and love. Such pure pride and such pure love.
Love can take on many different forms, and protecting those we love from life's many challenges -- especially the reality of our own mortality -- is certainly one form. But so is Judy's type of love -- the type of love that says, as hard as the truth is, I'm going to face it and hold your hand through it -- that, for me, is a more soul-filling kind.
