Story Amulet

In which reading prevails.

Once upon the 1980's, my mom made some weird choices of bedtime books. As a parent, I now get these were things she wanted to read herself - so read to us. Like Pride and Prejudice, where I learned, for example, you could talk smack behind a corset. With us and with my children, she was always, always, always good for a book.

This summer, she told me she was going to lift weights so she could continue to carry our newest bio baby as she got heavier. Instead, the universe scooped my mom back up into its massive lending library, swiftly, over the winter. That same baby pulled herself up to stand on the recliner cancer necessitated for my mom's edemic calves. She who had registered voters and exercised on the elliptical the week before her pancreatic symptoms first flared.

In her final difficult weeks, we read to her. They say the sense of hearing is the last to go and my mom had always been a good snoop. She hated to miss any conversation or op-ed. Between crappy articles on the eroding of civil rights, I told her she had done the work in birthing me, and now we were doing the work to support her leaving her body, a different difficult strait. She had read the NYT's by my premie incubator, for months, and now, my youngest in my lap, I was reading her the paper copy of the NYT's headlines unto her death. As in the beginning, so in the end.

My mom faced her cosmic exhaustion with a lot of sighing and some protective numbness. But to be read to was always a consolation and salve- especially if your hand was held, your forehead stroked. A good story was always an amulet.