Floating

My mother came from a family of floaters.

"Your grandmother could float in a pond on her back for hours and sleep," she told me the summers I floated with her in a green pond behind an Ohio farmhouse she and my father lived in for twenty-five years, long after I left home. Long before she moved here to die.

My husband, who has never doused a toe in anything other than chlorinated water, likes to ask me, "Which do you like better? Pool or pond?"

Pond.

The way you enter inch by inch on shoveled sand, if you are lucky, or how you step off a muddy bank, stirring the long webs of algae with a careful toe before sinking ankle-deep, your foot sucked into the dark muck, until it becomes, in the strange light of murky waters, a pearl. Then, you kick off from the cold ache of mud, ride the swell of your own weight through sun-warmed water, minnows and tadpoles brushing past as you kick toward the clear center.

Five months now and I am looking for metaphor everywhere.

________

The ambulance driver, who has transported my mother to the hospice, greets me on the driveway. "What is wrong with your mother?" he asks. He holds out his notebook of forms to be filled in. "All I've been told is it's fatal."

We stand in masks, six feet apart. A couple at the nearby nursing home lean against a long rectangular window and wave their cell phones, a small ghost on the other side of the glass, who cannot hear them.

I hold up my iPhone to show the driver the words I will later find typed into my mother's certificate of death at the end of the week: severe protein calorie malnutrition, oropharyngeal dysphagia, end stage dementia with Alzheimer features. The words I gave the hospice nurse when she came to the hospital two days earlier to evaluate my mother at my request. Translated.

"I don't know what we can do," the hospice woman had first explained to me on her arrival. "There isn't one thing that is killing her." I didn't know what to say, so then I gave her my list of her ailments.

And when I had finished, and when she had finished examining my mother, a ninety-pound wax doll in her hospital bed, the woman said, "But there is a tapestry here, a bigger picture. Let me see what I can do."

Behind the ambulance driver, behind the smoke of wildfires I can't see, a smear of mountain floats, the sun, neither day's nor dusk's, an orange wafer I keep swallowing.

________

It is late August, six months since the COVID-19 lockdown. My mother walks to the nurse's office in the assisted living center to tell the nurses that the world has gone white.

Can I stay here if I'm blind?

The nurses will tell me my mother asked them this again and again, none of us knowing where this swift onset of her blindness, long dammed by eye injections and shunts, will lead us. The eye specialist I take her to, my mother swaddled in the first flowered mask of the pandemic that the nurses will tie for her, shakes his head. He hazards a small stroke along the optic nerve, which will leave her, I find out later, picking at her food in the black Styrofoam boxes the aides deliver to the residents' rooms during the quarantine, sometimes, it seems, forgetting to announce that a meal has arrived, my mother unable to find or identify what she cannot cut into pieces.

Seven days I will drive back and forth to the emergency room, the hospital room, the hospice. The Grizzly Creek fire will balloon out of rock and standing dead trees and the Pine Gulch fire will surge larger than the Hayman fire decades past when ash rained down for twenty miles and settled over us at the burial of my husband's mother. This time, the ash sifts over my car, over...