Mother still talks about escaping.
“Just bring me my suitcase,” she says, a mysterious twinkle in her eye. She starts to put her forefinger to her mouth, as if to say, ‘Whisper only’.
Mother doesn’t know what Alzheimer’s or dementia is, but she knows all about escaping. She’s a master, having had to restart her life many times.
Now, my name is left behind occasionally. Oh, she’s still sly, looking at me, trying to hide the fact she doesn’t recognize me. Then coming out with the telltale statement, “I wonder if John’s still hiding under the bed.” She says I’m usually hiding somewhere at the home, maybe even sleeping with another resident. Mother!
I don’t remind her that John is sitting right in front of her. I know she gets upset at forgetting. But escaping, or planning to escape, has not made its way out of her grey matter yet. “I have to get out of here. I don’t like it here. Do you know what kind of place this is? It’s for old people,” says the woman who bore me and is now 84.
There is no encouragement or discouragement on my part. Hell, I’d be ecstatic if she made an escape attempt at the home. It’s my secret, but if she escaped I’d know she was cured. But I’m sure pushing the down button on the elevator is now beyond her, never mind figuring out how to operate the keypad and code that unlocks the front door. Even I have problems with it.
The Prime Minister and Governor General’s office sent her a note this year, congratulating her on her 85th birthday. She chuckles. She still knows how old she is. The note was sent a year too soon, but she has no intention of correcting them.
Every time Mother’s Day approaches, I think of her escapes, one potentially deadly escape in particular. She doesn’t remember much of the story, but I’ve heard it enough times that it’s emblazoned in my memory.
As a teenager, I was assigned to write a story for history class about my personal hero. I chose a heroine, my mother.
She got both of us, me in tow as a seven-month infant, out of East Germany soon after the fences sprang up and the guards were posted between East and West. The escape was our personal drum roll to the Cold War, when isms separated families and loved ones. I remember how proud I was that she could soar above the rest, endanger her and my life in the flight to freedom. Most of my family stayed behind.
I always used the eagle soaring metaphor, but the escape was far from soaring. It was more like tunnelling. But to me, her son who sees the osprey on the Rideau every day, she can soar with the best.
Somehow this woman, only 24 at the time, managed to coerce my grandmother into coaxing a train engineer to hollow out a section under the coals of his steam engine to fit the two of us.
So, how did she twist her mother’s arm into a plot that could have meant years in Siberia? Grandma was having this torrid affair with the train engineer. Simply put, mother found out and used the information to our advantage. No, I didn’t give my high school history teacher that information; I fudged on how she did it.
Anyway, the train was going across the border between East and West Germany and only those with papers, those not born in the east, could leave. She was born in the west, I in the east, and she wasn’t leaving me behind.
There was only three minutes in which she could scurry on board to hide. Three minutes, the time it took a state policeman to walk along one side of the train and then move to the next side. Three minutes in which she had to keep a colicky baby quiet, run to the train, climb aboard the coal car, and hide under the coals in the pre-arranged compartment.
I swear I can still feel her pounding heart as she held me close to her chest running to that coal car. Maybe that’s a false memory, but it sounds good.
It was only a half hour ride after that until we were in the west. We were free. During that half hour, she frantically masticated cookies, feeding them to me slowly to stop me from bawling.
So on Mother’s Day, I always see her soaring, escaping her latest confinement.
It was Mother’s Day the last time I would make an attempt to bring her to my home for a meal. Like me, she loved to watch the osprey soar overhead. There’s a nest on the island across the bay from where I live. She’d sit on the back deck, absorb the sun and watch as the eagle – really a fish hawk — soared and then suddenly dived, hitting the water and bringing up a fish.
That day she could barely get out of the car by herself, never mind walk with the help of a walker along the path leading to the doorway. Today she’s in a wheelchair.
Only 300 yards from the house, an osprey, fish gripped securely in its talons, flew ahead of us. She watched it curiously. Slowing to a crawl and finally pulling over, I watched in amazement. The fish looked too heavy. It finally tried to rest a spell on a mailbox post. It rested on one leg, the fish secured in the other talon. Seconds after it resumed its flight, the pickerel, still wriggling, fell to the pavement of County Road 1, then flipped and flopped to the gravel shoulder.
I hurried home. Told Mom to wait in the car and ran back to where the fish had come to rest. Only three minutes had elapsed, but the fish was gone. No one was in sight. I know ospreys do not scoop up prey from land, but they are great fishers. The idea of cooking my mother a fish an eagle had caught was dashed. She had to settle for pickled herring.
She was thankful for her day at the house. She didn’t know it would be her last.
The next morning, walking to the store for a newspaper, my neighbour stopped me. He blathered on about the magnificent breakfast he’d had. “Pickerel,” he said, “and half of it’s still left.”
I glowered at him. Bob could probably feel the piercing of my eyes. I told him I’d also seen the event. He offered me the half, but didn’t understand the significance. I declined gracefully. But then he casually said: “the osprey was probably just too old for that size of fish.”
“Bob,” I said, “the eagle is never too old.”
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
Article by John Kessel
