Creative Nonfiction

The Face of a Mother

by Paula Zwicke

The heat overtakes me as I walk through the door and into the tiny bedroom crowded with people and a dead body. On-duty police officer. Nurse. Undertaker. Big-bellied man with the dirty, urine-colored windbreaker that snaps instead of zips. I hear their murmur of voices but make out no words. I move closer to her to see what I can see. 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” says the big-bellied coroner. He shuffles closer, his gray stubble and stale breath too near mine. “Your mother died before she hit the bathroom floor. We think she stood up from the toilet and suffered a major cardiac event.” 

 His voice trails off like an eavesdropped conversation from next door as the man-at-least-my-mother’s-age leaves the room. The nurse and officer follow him. The undertaker props himself in the corner. His plaid suit hangs off his body. He musters a nod. 

The cruelness of dementia left Mom angry often. “This is my bad daughter,” she volunteered as the doctor entered the curtained cubicle for this newest ailment that landed us in the emergency room some months ago. I recognized him from a previous visit. He recognized me as the daughter with a health care power of attorney who journaled in the stiff chair at her mother’s side and struggled with Herculean effort to appear less than stiff herself. “She doesn’t care about me. Only comes because she has to,” Mom added. My pen stopped. My back straightened, and then just as quickly slumped. I disliked the woman she was, cursed the dementia that stole her, and wept for the mother I lost. 

One month before she died, I met the woman I longed to see when I stopped at Mom’s assisted living home to deliver her new shoes. She sat at a table in the wallpapered dining room, three other residents nearby. An aide cleared the breakfast dishes. 

“Can you stay a few minutes for coffee?”  

I checked my watch.  “Sure, Mom. I can stay a few minutes.”  

The aide poured my coffee into a brown plastic cup and warmed Mom’s. Mom told her favorite stories, and I answered her inquiries about her grandkids. I shared stories, too, and oh, how we laughed. Oh how I loved her joy. 

“I have a gift for you,” she said as she slid the package to me. I unwrapped the handmade wall hanging. “I won it at bingo.” 

“Thank you, Mom. It’s beautiful. I know exactly where I’ll hang it.” I hadn’t received a gift from Mom or a phone call for my birthday in a decade. But today, this beautiful day, she remembered me. 

“This is my daughter. She’s the oldest of my three girls,” she told the ladies at the nearby table. “She is a high school teacher and still finds time to help me. I’d be lost without her.”  

She smiled the way mothers do. “I thought of you right away, honey.”  

I forgot my errands and stayed for ninety minutes. The best and last ninety minutes I would spend with her alive and finally happy. 

She lays on the narrow gurney with her eyes closed, face and shoulders bare, a deep crevasse worn where the clavicle meets the humerus. The ashy stubble of her pixie haircut seems undisturbed unlike her pasty forehead, where a four-inch cut begins at the hairline and crosses to the right temple. The wound looks like a line drawn with red Sharpie. One pink smear smudges the wound’s edge. My fingers cross her clean, warm forehead as I imagine its impact with the ceramic-tiled floor of the bathroom. An index finger explores the ivory temple, a crow’s foot at the corner of her eye. Rosy eyelids, thin as communion wafers, conceal her smoky blue eyes. I miss them already. The mouth sits open, lips warm and smooth except for the delicate lines near the corners. A row of crooked teeth, yellowed by years of coffee, peek out from the upper lip. 

I fix my cheek against her soft leather one, still sweet with this morning’s powder, as I close my eyes and slide my face over her polished grooves of age. As I cup the other cheek, warm and elastic like mine, I hold her shoulder and nuzzle my face into the crook of her neck. I drink in her scent with each slow breath. When I finally straighten myself, I cradle her face as a parent would a child’s. My fingers crawl along it as I memorize every feature. 

“Goodbye, Mom.” 

She rests now, her face a patchwork of warm and cool skin, and I think of the gift she gave me that day in the dining room a few short weeks ago. 

“No more anger, Mom. No more fear and confusion. Only sweet peace. I love you, Mom. I’ll miss you.”   

I kissed her three times like the goodbye at an airport departure gate and walked away from her, I through one door and Mom through another. Until we meet again, Momma.