After Mother's Fall

By Priscilla M. Kline

Somewhere, inside this crumpled shell of aging cells … mother still …
Glimpsed in a singular twinkle in the eye as memory catches momentarily
          … in the smile, the occasional burst of hooting laughter,
         the sharing of a thought with hints of the once-rich vocabulary.
         When asked in an attempt to stimulate connecting thoughts
         with reference to a parakeet similar in color and named for one of long ago
         provided by a well-meaning daughter, "I have no affinity for that bird."

The daily tedium of struggle, "Why won't God let me die?"
         Unmeasured, unreal time spent with the daughters from far away after
         the fall … a broken limb … confinement miles from home in strange, new,
         sterile surroundings in hopes that bone will knit.

Daily visits with hours of few words, occasional flashes of meaning,
         touched interlaced with shadows of fear.
         Wheeled down the longest hall past similar sufferers, the trembling begins
         … the whimpered, tremulous, "I'm scared."
         "What are you scared of, Mother?" "I don't know … I'm just scared."
         A pause … "I know…it's all right, you're all right."
         More shivers … "I'm afraid I'll never go home again … will I?"
         "That's the plan … what we're working toward. We don't know when."
         No empty promises for one so proud, so long now humbled by infirmity.
         Frail bones, loose connections between brain and body.

Home again, months passed, but nothing "fixed," little healing,
         thoughts meander, time has little relevance.
         "Where's Scilla? I want to see her once more before I die."
         The intermittently yet oft repeated query, painful to the daughter present,
         now, giving daily care, engenders feelings not unlike those perhaps felt
         by the brother of the prodigal son.
         Not intended to be hurtful, indeed, understandable,
         Yet, nonetheless small, pointed arrows to the heart.

Long after the visit, unrelated in time or space but present in the fog-filled brain,
         connections unexpectedly occur … I can die now … I've seen Scilla again."
         Yet she lives another day … and another.

"After Mother's Fall," poem and painting, will appear in The HeART of Nursing: Expressions of Creative Art in Nursing, published in June by Center Nursing Publishing, Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing.