This is for anyone who has ever sat across the table from an 80-something mother and begged her to eat. Please. A soft-boiled egg. Two slices of banana.
A piece of buttered toast. Jell-O? Tapioca? Vanilla pudding? Please.
This is for anyone who has risen to the wee-hour calling of the woman who brought you into the world. You go to her foggily.
"I need to move," she says. Her back aches from lying in one position too long.
The position is dictated by the tubes and bags that
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hang from various parts of her body.
You help her reach a sitting position, and you stroke her bony back.
"My tailbone," she says.
And you rub her tailbone.
"That feels good," she says.
Then you walk her around the townhouse one more time, carrying the bags in tow. She needs the walk, needs to stretch the unused muscles. Needs to know that there is a world beyond the sheets and
blankets, beyond the tubes and bags.
You tuck her in again, tell her you'll see her in the morning and hope it's true. You hope, for her sake and yours, that sleep will last this time and that you will awaken to soft light in the windows.
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This is for anyone who has found the bag leaking in the middle of the night, who has had to do what only the home-health nurses have done before. Someone must do it now, at 4:11 a.m. Yes, you have watched a trained professional do it before, and now it is up to you. You summon the courage borne of necessity and get at it. Peeling and prepping and applying and hoping. Hoping that this time it holds.
This is for anyone who has sat on the sofa and had the frank discussion about living and dying. It's so basic. Do you want to keep living? Yes, she says. Do you know you need to eat more if you want to live? Yes, she says. And yet ...
This is for everyone who has done the all-day dance from cook to waiter to bus boy to nurse to launderer to house-cleaner to friend.
This is for everyone who has been overwhelmed with gratitude upon going to the door and seeing a woman holding a large pot, saying, "Here. I brought you some supper."
This is for everyone who has considered the wizened life force across the table and marveled at how she endured the lean years and how she somehow made sure you had new jeans in September and how she packed up and moved so many times and how she instilled in you a sense of right and wrong and how she made sure you went to college.
And this is for everyone who has found himself standing in her kitchen alone, late in the day, letting the sadness trickle down his cheeks in rivers because there was no holding it back any longer.
SAM COOK is a Duluth News Tribune columnist and outdoors writer. Reach him at (218) 723-5332 or scook@duluthnews.com .
