Grace

Until the day she died, I lied to my mother about the plants. There were two hanging rows of them, above my kitchen sink and in the windows overlooking the back yard. She watered them on her visits to my house, keeping them healthy and beautiful.

Before she moved to Indianapolis, to live with my sister, Judy, she told me what to do -- this one gets watered once a week, that one every third day, another one when the soil feels only slightly moist. Every time I visited the two of them for the next five years, she asked how the plants were doing. "Just fine," I always said, "still green and growing."

That was the lie I told her, because, of course, I had managed to kill the last one of them within two years. The lie I told myself was that I was just being kind to my mother, giving her one less thing to brood over during a time when she was withdrawing into obsessive worry over her multiplying health problems. But maintaining the fiction of still-flourishing plants was also a way for me to keep alive the time when my mother was not housebound in another city and could visit me anytime she wanted.

I suspect she saw through both lies; mothers are usually smart that way. Besides, she was a caregiver of one kind or another for most of her life, an expert in the lies we sometimes tell ourselves and each other just to get through the worst of times. When she was very young, she took care of a sister who had TB. When our father began his slow descent into breathless immobility, she took care of him, too. In between, she took care of pets and plants and all sorts of people. Not satisfied with two granddaughters of her own, she enrolled in the foster grandparents program.

Finally there came the time when she was the one needing care, and my sister stepped in to give it. They had planned to spend my mother's retirement years traveling and enjoying each other's company in a way they had never been able to. It didn't work out quite that way. Watching the two of them in the last several years, I saw Judy's time become ever-more consumed by my mother's needs. She prepared the meals, kept track of the medications, took her on innumerable doctor visits, helped her bathe and dress and negotiate the growing treachery of the slow walk from bedroom to living room, all while doing whatever she needed to do to stay focused on her full-time job.

My sister essentially gave up her own life in the last few years, dedicating it completely to our mother. That's what caregivers do, I finally came to appreciate in a way I didn't quite grasp when I saw our mother going through it with our father. Other family members do what they can, whether by contributing time or money or emotional support, but the greatest burden always seems to fall on one person.

And those caregivers need care, too, more than we often realize. Whatever we think we are giving them, triple it, and it still probably wouldn't be enough. I know there were times when I talked to Judy on the phone or in conversations after Saturday-night dinners in Indianapolis when she sounded emotionally exhausted, near the end of her coping skills. When that happened, I tried to say the right thing, encourage her, let her know she wasn't facing all of that alone. It was especially touchy when she started expressing irritation at our mother's illness-induced demands, and it was obvious that she was feeling guilty for even seeming resentful.

For every time I said the right thing at the right time, there must have been at least 20 when I didn't. A few weeks ago, my sister told me in a phone call that she was sitting in her chair in front of the TV, her cat resting on the blanket on her lap, pretending she didn't have to go anywhere or do anything. How many other times had she felt that way, when a kind word would have made getting through another day less of a chore?

It's remarkable how powerful a simple, kind word can be. A week ago Friday, I posted a few words here saying I would be absent for a short time because of my mother's death. I did not do it to elicit sympathy, but I got it, in comments attached to the post from people who had read the blog, even a couple who have mostly disagreed with me philosophically about almost everything. None of the comments were elaborate -- they were just short remarks of condolence. But I can't begin to convey how moved I was by those simple expressions of support in a time of need, a little human-to-human reaching out among the usual cyberspace clutter of hastily conceived, opinionated exchanges.

There were a lot of kind words at the visitation for my mother on Wednesday and surrounding the service for her on Thursday. Most of the people who attend our funerals, whether family or friends or caring co-workers, seem to know instinctively what to say and when to stay silent. They are there mostly just to show that they are connected with us and to let us know they will still be there when the sadness has passed. One of the kindest -- and wisest -- things was said by the minister from my mother's church in Fort Wayne, who conducted the service. "Why do we grieve," she asked, "especially those of us who really believe that our loved one is going to a better place? Shouldn't this be a time of rejoicing?" We grieve, she said, so that we might be comforted.

I've thought a lot about the concept of grace in the metaphysical sense and not come to any better wisdom about it than anyone else. But I do know that to get close to the state of grace here and now, in the lives we live every day, we just need to slow down once in a while and let each other know, through something as simple as a kind word, that we understand what the other person is going through.

More than half of the arrangements at my mother's service, the family was happy to see, were not cut flowers that would shine briefly then wither and die, but green, growing plants that could be taken by those attending and nurtured for years, a living reminder of a care-giving woman who graced us for a brief time with her presence. It was a satisfying moment after the graveside service to pass those plants around to friends and relatives, making sure my sister got first choice of which ones to take back to the home she and my mother had shared.

I didn't take any of them. Had to give them a fighting chance.