Too Fast
Bob Dylan looks up at me from the floor of my friend’s bathroom. He’s on the cover of the Rolling Stone, and he’s looking old. His eyes are deep inside folds of wrinkly flesh, his lips are thin, and his cheeks sunken. A fine mesh of lines patterns his face. He doesn’t look bad for a 65-year-old man, but I am so confused. Isn’t Bob only in his forties? Still hale and robust and firm of flesh?
When did Bob Dylan get old? You look away and you look back and suddenly everyone is looking old. My mother, who is now 85, looks decrepit. I keep thinking of her, how she looked as we drove away to the airport, how she looks smiling tremulously out from a picture I took before we left. Someone, somehow, replaced my vigorous, strong-willed parent with a frail, confused, passive old lady.
I have lots of issues with my mother, issues which have faded some, in tandem with her vibrancy, from raging hatred to pronounced irritation. I can still barely stand to be in the same room as her, never mind the same country. But there were things I always admired about her, like her strength, both physical and mental.
My mother kept our family going through the decades of my father’s drunken binges, perhaps not all that successfully in the long term, but at least we always had a place to live and food on the table and festivities at the proper calendar moments. She worked for many years as a nurse and was careful with her money, so we were able to live a reasonable lower-middle class existence in a small, uncomplicated town in Northwestern Ontario. She maintained a large vegetable garden, hauling water by hand from a cistern through the long dry summers, keeping it going through sheer force of will when the well was running low and rain was months away. All winter she determinedly shoveled mountains of snow out of the long driveway and filled dozens of rigged-up receptacles with suet and peanut butter to keep the hardy northern birds coming to visit her. I never grew up with the sense that women were passive or helpless or dependent.
I grew up with a role model of a woman who was capable and competent in the real world. That was the good part. The less stellar aspect of her performance as woman was that she brought that same endurance and competence to her role as a codependent enabler of a raging alcoholic. Between the two of them, my parents completely messed up my brother and left me wrapped up in tangles of fear. But I never saw my mother as weak or confused, for which I am glad.
So how odd to see her now, teetering around clinging to a walker, unable to hear or make sense of much of what she does register. Time is taking her in agonizing slow motion along an inevitable trajectory from youth and health to infirmity and death. I think of my friend and her mother’s shockingly fast descent along that same path over just a few months. She took the trip in weeks that my mother is making over decades. Life made a time lapse movie of my mother’s descent and played it back for my friend’s mother at fast speed, the jerking choppy images flying past, a woman in motion, shriveling up and finally disappearing.
The same speed of time passing seems to be happening in my house as well, as I realize that the pants I bought my eight-year-old son two weeks ago are already too short for him. He looks at times like a miniature teenager, the baby-round softness melting away before my eyes. It is all going too fast. I want it all to stop, just for a day or two, so I can catch my breath and try to believe it is true.
