Mowing and Remembering

Mowing the lawn became my job when the last child left home. Chuck bought a zero turning radius lawn-mower and I learned how to use it. At first it was a stretch to add mowing to my list of chores. As I got used to the mower and began taking the job for granted, it became a task I enjoy.

I don’t answer the phone while I’m mowing. I’m rarely interrupted. I listen to podcasts on my earbuds under my noise protection headphones. Sometimes I listen intently, and sometime my thoughts take over.

I’ve enjoyed planning the order of my mowing, and the direction, trying to never mow the same tracks in the same month, choosing my angle based on wind direction. I’ve become a little bit smug about not mowing in a circle around the yard, but always having long parallel lines in the yard for a day or so after I mow.

Last time I mowed the yard was before July 20. I know that because we left for vacation on July 20. As we were driving through western Kansas, I got a phone call from the facility where Mom was staying. They had a health care room available for her. I directed them to call my brother, and by the following Monday, Larry and Alyce and their sons had Mom’s room transformed from something that looked a bit institutional and impersonal into her own space that reflected her life and her tastes.

The day after I got home from Colorado, I got another phone call. Mom was at PACE that day. Her doctor called to say that her health was changing, that he could be wrong, because she seems to rally when we don’t expect it, but that it looked to him like she was in her final weeks.

So when I got home, even though it had rained regularly while we were gone,

I did not mow the lawn.

I spent my days with Mom as much as possible. So did my brothers and my sister. She was with us for a week and a half after that day. Except for the first couple of nights, someone was with her all of that time.

After she left us, we were still together most of the time, except when we separated to do our individual lists of things that could not wait.

The lawn could wait.

We gathered our kids and we planned her memorial and we took care of business and it rained regularly. The lawn got taller. Chuck did some mowing, but could not get to all of it.

Today is August 21 and I did some mowing. I had to mow in a circle around the yard to prevent windrows, and even then, at the tallest setting, I had to mow areas twice, and still had some windrows. Some areas are so tall I can’t mow them at all, and Chuck will have to bring in the tractor mower.

Windrows

During the last years of Mom’s life, whenever I would go to see her, she would ask both what I’d done that day and what work was ahead of me. It’s likely that Mom and I have talked about mowing every single time I’ve mowed since Dad passed away. It’s a regular fixture in our warm weather conversation. In these last years, when her short term memory was pretty shaky, we could talk about mowing as a fresh topic five to ten times in a visit.

It wasn’t annoying. It was a challenge, though, because I wanted to protect her from being embarrassed about forgetting what we just talked about. When she asked yet again, I’d try to word my answer a little bit differently. It was kind of a game for me to find multiple ways to tell her I’d mowed. Her follow up was always about how long it took me to mow my yard.

“It takes three hours.”

“Usually I’m mowing for about three hours.”

“If it’s not too thick, it takes about three hours.”

“Sometimes I can get done faster, but usually it is around three hours.”

I found myself crying as I mowed the lawn, realizing that this time, I won’t be having that conversation with her about my tasks for today.

Because both she and dad had memory loss, and because it also was in their families, I am preparing myself emotionally for that possibility as I age. Often that preparation has been in terms of preparing myself for the hard things that may be ahead of me...the losses I may face.

As I relived those conversations with Mom, and the tenderness I felt for her then and now, I realized

I could be OK being loved that way.

It would not be so hard to have my children or my spouse or a friend be telling me the same story again and again and again, just because they loved me and wanted to be with me for a while.