It’s been a long day. The wine is gone, but there’s about one finger of Glenfiddich in a glass to get me to the finish line. I’m more emotionally than physically exhausted after the long drive back from Laguna Woods where I took my ninety- two-year-old mom to the neurosurgeon for the pre-op pep talk. This will be the fifth, and—we’ve all decided—the final one. The previous surgery occurred a year and a half ago, on my sixty-fifth birthday. It was a seven-hour ordeal, digging out the arthritic detritus and rebuilding the lower part of her spine, and could have gone either way, even for somebody younger. She sailed through it like a teenager, but it took a long year for the light to seep back into her eyes, and still the pain persists. Always the devil’s choice between pain and pills. At first it was all Percocet, which kept her out of the game for months. No ambition to do the walking she needed for recovery. Sleeping all the time. And worst of all, she couldn’t concentrate enough to read, one of her greatest loves. When the pandemic hit she found herself sequestered within a sequestered world, like the smallest of the Russian nesting dolls. Hello in there.
We tried all kinds of things to wean her off the pills—CBD, Voltaren gel, Tylenol, even cannabis, and I cracked up one day when I got a text from my dad: Mom wants to know what you did with her gummies. Was it really fifty years ago that she was so upset when I was kicked out of my Jesuit high school for smoking weed? (“We’re so disappointed in you.”) Or two years later when I spent the night in the Manassas County jail? Okay, that was scary. But fortunately for my mom, who is nervous by nature, I was terrible at the whole criminal thing and pretty much behaved myself over time. At least as far as she knew.
A few weeks ago she told me, “Rick, I’ve had it with this whole COVID thing. I’m old. I don’t have a year to waste.” I smiled because this is the exact kind of complaining that means she’s coming back into herself. And after eighteen months the opioids have mostly given over to Advil, she’s walking regularly, getting her hair done, reading Smithsonian and National Geographic, and is seriously worried that she’s putting too much weight on her bony frame. (“You know, I never raised any fat kids,” she once told my wife. Yikes!) Truth is, she’s so frail I hardly see how gravity can get a good grip on her. I want to tell her the year would have been a loss either way, but I think she knows.
We’re all hoping that the coming operation will conclude a way of life that’s gone on for twelve years—the widening gyre of surgery, recovery, pain pills, rinse and repeat. At the pre-op meeting her surgeon, Dr. K, shows me the newest imaging. I tell him the screws he’s already put in her back look like flying buttresses, everything splayed onto her pelvic bone like a gothic cathedral. “I should show you X’s pictures,” he says with a light in his eyes. “His looks like the Eiffel Tower.” I want to say Just remember, righty-tighty, but it’s not my show.
The pictures tell him that she must have fallen at some point in the past year and fractured her spine just above the spot he’d repaired before. Missed it by that much. But apparently it’s an easy fix. Some screws, a little glue, and voila. And why not? Her heart is strong, her stubbornness stronger. She’s already shopping for dresses for her oldest granddaughter’s wedding in three months, when she’s determined to walk down the aisle on my dad’s arm and show off her famously straight posture.
A couple weeks ago we went for a walk around her condo courtyard—Mom all hunched over the walker, twisted in pain, me coaxing her on past pots full of bright red geraniums. Left foot, right foot. Doctor’s orders. We took in each one, commenting on how European it all was—everywhere in Italy and France, and Croatia even, you see window boxes full of bright geraniums. She knows, she’s been there. She’s been everywhere. I took a picture of my mom with the flowers and told her we needed to come out here in a month, after the surgery, and see how they’ve grown. We talk about it every time we visit the various doctors, prepping her for the operation, this one promising to finally resolve the whole problem of the pain in her legs and hip, and her inability to walk with confidence or to stand up straight, which has always been her greatest skill. She’ll tell you. All those years of yoga.
“Rick, we need to go walk the geraniums,” she says, the following week. We’re off to the doctor, and spy them through a far window as we shuffle to the elevator. She took Advil instead of Norco this morning, so she remembers things.
“We’re late, Mom, we’ll see them when we come back.” But when we return it’s steamy-hot outside and she’s wearing a wool sweater, so maybe a nap’s a better idea.
Another time, the same thing. “Oh Rick, we have to go look at the geraniums.”
“They sure are bright out there, Mom.” But she fell last night and is favoring her right hip, so maybe no stroll in the courtyard today. It wasn’t a bad fall, more of a slow-motion slide to the floor, but she banged her head a little. No lump or pain. My sis and I joke that if she landed on her head every time, she’d be fine.
You need to have a hard head, and hard everything else, growing up as the youngest of seven on a farm in Kansas. Her father never finished grade school, but she and all her siblings went to good colleges; she escaped the farm to Kansas City where she married my ebullient dad, and would have spent her twenties shopping at Emery Bird’s, dining at the Savoy, and drinking beer in all the best backyards, except for having too much fun one Valentine’s Day, and nine months later, there I was. “How did that happen?” she asked when she found out, according to family lore. Well.
We can have a good laugh about it now, right? Well, maybe not. (Still too soon?) But the fact is she took on the job of raising me and my sister and brother with gusto. Even to the point of giving up her three-pack-a-day habit (when I was eight years old). I used to think it was an iffy decision to let me walk alone a whole mile to kindergarten, but came to appreciate the sense of independence and savvy it taught me running away from the older boy who liked to throw rocks at kids on Quindaro Avenue. My mom loved her new in-laws and liked the idea of nine-month-old me spending quality time with my grandmother, who once a week would wait at the head of Twenty-First Street for the bus downtown, which would slow enough for my mom to chuck me into her waiting arms. I’m kidding, of course. Certainly, the bus came to a full stop. In any case, she knew I’d rather be up at the bar drinking beer with Gram and her friend Mrs. Penny instead of being dragged from store to store downtown, which wouldn’t do anyone’s back any good.
Over the years she grew into the job. She had dinner on the table every night, volunteered at school, drove carpool for all of our suburban activities, and along with my dad created a happy household where my friends, their friends, and our extended crew of loud Croatian relatives were always welcome. We thought of ourselves as the Leave It to Beaver family, and it is only looking back now that I can see how her June Cleaver disguise masked a smart, funny (albeit fretful) woman who could turn the minutia of any day into the time of her life. Somehow her staunch Catholic conservatism was able to morph itself over the years to accommodate the shifting challenges of family. After twenty disreputable years as a single musician, I married a divorced (gasp) woman with a six-year-old daughter, Kristin, whom my mom embraced as her own granddaughter. My sister came out as gay, took on a partner, and adopted two kids. More grandchildren! My brother’s oldest son is getting ready to move in with his Black girlfriend, and is worried about what to tell Granny. She knows this and waves her hand dismissively: “That Brett, he’s really something. Did you hear he got a big raise?” In fact, she loves her grandkids without limit, dotes on them, brags on them, and I think that might be the one thing that has her hanging on for so long. When I was at their place this week there were two more packages with dresses for Kristin’s wedding. Dr. K says she’ll be good to go by then, and I know she’ll look magnificent.
So tomorrow’s the big surgery and I just called my mom to wish her luck. I wanted to mention the geraniums, how we hadn’t had a chance to visit them— next week for sure—but as usual I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She told me all about her COVID and MRSA tests, about what a great guy Dr. K is, how Maria’s coming over to give her a shower tonight, how she gets to sleep in tomorrow because surgery was pushed back an hour, how she’s not nervous (she’s definitely nervous). I know she’s been talking to everybody today because her voice is raspy, like SpongeBob when he’s been out of the water for too long. I tell her I love her, we’ll see her tomorrow when she wakes up, and am about to hang up—
“Oh Rick, have you talked to Claire?” She always wants to hear the latest about my twenty-five-year-old, who lives in Chicago.
“No, Mom, not today, but she knows what’s going on and will be praying for you.”
“Well, you just tell her I love her and that everything’s going to be all right.”
It’s four weeks after the surgery. I’m standing alone in the courtyard of the condo complex perusing the geraniums. You’d think the ones in the center, in the bright sun, would be the fullest, but the blooms on these are sparser, like thinning hair, compared to the ones in the shadier alcoves that seem to be enjoying life away from the direct glare of the world.
A door opens at the other end of the courtyard and here comes the procession. First my mom, ensconced in her black back brace, more erect than I’ve seen her in years, stepping instead of shuffling inside the protection of her walker. Behind her, my sis has a hold of her support belt—a fall now would be unthinkable. And then my dad, all ninety-six years of him, pushing an empty wheelchair, in case Mom gets tired and can’t make it back to her room. Team Arlene.
She draws near and my head indicates the geraniums.
“I wonder if they missed us,” I say.
“Oh, Rick, they’re just gorgeous.” She has on pink lipstick and her shag of gray hair has been recently washed, combed, and tucked behind a sparkling barrette. You can see thoughts dancing behind her green eyes as she squints in the midday sun.
“What about these, Mom? I’d a thought they’d be bigger.” I point to a plant that seems more ranch than hat. She pushes toward it in her walker.
“They just need to be deadheaded.” She pinches off a dried blossom and ruffles her hand through the green foliage to verify that new buds are coming. She sweeps away some fallen petals and pokes a bony finger into the soil to check for . . . moisture? bugs? a pulse? Her lower lip droops in thought and her eyes narrow. Then her face goes blank and she’s far away somewhere.
“Mom?”
She comes to, looks at me in surprise for a moment, then her face takes on that combination of a frown and a smile that has always had me worried about what she’ll say next.
“Don’t worry, Rick,” she says. “They’ll be fine.”
She turns in her walker and I can almost hear the gears starting to rotate as the parade cranks into slow-motion—Mom, Sis, Dad, and now me, walking backwards in front like a coxswain, urging her on to the next stand of geraniums, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Rick Krizman writes music, stories, and poems and holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. His work has appeared in the Wising Up Press, Sediment, Flash Fiction Magazine, Phantom Drift, Belletrist, Driftwood, Switchback, Molotov Cocktail, the Big Smoke, and elsewhere. He is currently revising a memoir about his forty-year music composing career and his adventures in Beijing as a broadcast consultant. Rick is the father of two grown daughters and lives with his wife and other animals in Santa Monica, CA.