By Cheryl Calvert, with David Anderson
“Your mother is not going to recover. Not this time.”
I stood outside her hospital room as the doctor confirmed my worst fears.
We had had our last conversation.
I would not hear my mom’s sweet voice again.
Her bright eyes would not recognize my face, her so sweet smile would not reappear.
For the last five months mom had not been eating much, and not talking at all, groggy from medication and asleep most of the day.
Transferred to the hospital from the nursing home where her life-long sweetheart and husband had taken up residence down the hall in an adjoining ward at my insistence (“what do you mean my mom can’t be with my dad!”), my mom’s love-wrinkled face now seemed somehow to have become smoother to the touch as I stroked her cheeks, her eyes remaining closed hiding the blue-green twinkle I’d otherwise have seen.
Shortly after I had succeeded in securing for my dad a room down the hall from my mom, nursing home staff expressed concern for mom’s dementia saying that she was calling out at night for her father, yelling “Dad! Dad!”
“Oh, that’s not her father she is calling for, it’s her husband,” I explained. “Mom and dad were always fond of addressing one another as ‘Mom,’ and ‘Dad.’
There in the nursing home, I’d often find them both in her room, nose to nose – it’s how they talked – and then they’d kiss.
And one day it would be the last time.
I brushed back the whisps of her gray hair as she lay now in the hospital where she had been taken. She looked so peaceful, and I, not able to stop the tears, so wistful.
I so desperately wanted to talk to her. Just one last time. I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. I just needed to hold one last memory close to my heart, something to help me through the days that would follow when the pain of her death would tear me apart.
“All my possessions for one moment of time,” may have been fiction rather than fact as the last recorded words of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, but for me they were my heart’s cry.
“Please God! Just one more time for mom to be lucid and in her right mind again!”
“I have a gift for you.” It was my mom’s voice! She was there! She was there! My mom was speaking! Her eyes were open! She was smiling at me!
Raising her hand, her fist clasped tight, she slowly opened her fingers.
“I have a gift for you,” she said. “Two gifts.”
“What is it?” I asked her.
But, of course, there was nothing in the palm of her hand.
Still though, she did in fact have a gift – two gifts. Priceless gifts.
For then she said what would matter so very much in those hard days ahead. She told me about those two gifts that she would pass down to me as her ‘legacy of love.’
When the arduous task became mine to clear out mom and dad’s house when they were both gone; when the papers were signed, the house was sold, and I turned and looked back one last time at the only place I’d ever called home, where so many sweet precious memories had been made, I remembered her words.
The words she said would stay with me and matter. I would always remember what she said.
“Love your family. Live with joy.”
Those were my mom’s final gifts.
Her legacy of love.
