We all live in a Breugel World

My mother died last month. Five years ago, she had a stroke, and within a few months, my father died. Consequently, I thought she would follow her beloved Dave soon after. She didn’t. She got up every day and faced her new self. She was pretty severely disabled. She could talk but not converse. It turns out conversations are complicated back-and-forth dances. Speaking of dancing, she couldn’t do that either — she had a walker that she could painfully stand in and move about 15 to 20 feet. It was hard for me not to think about everything she had given up.

Yet what is this life anyway? Is it walking? Is it even conversations? I used to look at older people and wonder how they could stand to move so slowly and make such dull conversation! Now I am older, and I enjoy my slow, dull life a lot more than I ever would have expected! Maybe it was that way for my mother. I noticed that she loved her caregivers, family visits, and wheelchair walks outside in the sunshine. I can only hope she had some happiness.

Her health stayed pretty stable. When I visited, we would watch Turner Classic Movies. Some were really good movies I had never seen. I watched In the Heat of the Night, Grand Prix (car racing without CGI in glamourous sixties clothes), and a 1931 Noel Coward movie called Private Lives. I brought her big print books from the library. When I left her house, I kissed her first and then said “I love you, Mom.” She would look at me shyly and say “I love you, too.” That was a lot of expressed emotion for Mom — but she liked the ritual of it. I did too.

Recently she stopped reading the newspaper. Then she was refusing meals, and finally, she stopped drinking the 40 oz of water that her caregivers had patiently presented to her each and every day. I called hospice. They helped us, and mom’s caregivers, make her last days comfortable. The family started coming by as her death drew near. My sister flew up from Arizona, and my three brothers and their wives came for hours at a time. Some stayed all night. Grandchildren came, and one energetic toddler great-grandchild.

I started thinking about The Fall of Icarus by Bruegel. It depicts the young Icarus falling out of the sky into the water. No one notices what is happening. The plowman continues to plow, the ship sails off, and the sun beats down with terrible intensity. It wasn’t the inattention that made me think of Bruegel. It was all the life in the painting at the same time as death. There was so much life in the house during my mother’s death. There were quiet voices in my mother’s room. Other conversations growing more animated in the kitchen and the living room. Death in one room and talk of change and death, but also of cars and vacations flowing through the house along with the love. We were hanging out in a way we hadn’t done since we all lived together as children. My mother probably would have loved it; perhaps she did love it.

She passed very quietly at 2:45 pm one afternoon about three days into this informal vigil. The next day it started to snow. We were all back in our homes by then. I couldn’t stop watching the snow fall in its gentle way, the landscape becoming monochromatic while at the same time becoming pure and beautiful. My heart felt mystery in the snow. The texting started between my sibs and me about the unusual snowfall. Forecasters had missed it. Our parents had met on a ski trip and continued to ski together into their eighties. We all thought that maybe Joan and Dave were skiing in heaven.

Meaning falls out of the sky sometimes and not just in Breugel paintings.