tiny waves
The first time, I kept asking my mother how I could help. I needed to do something. I had emailed her information about a local cancer support group. I had given her a book about the best diet for cancer patients. She never attended the group, and I found the book on the hallway table where she kept things to re-gift. But to whom could she re-gift the cancer diet book?
So when she asked me to wash her hair in the kitchen sink because she wasn’t supposed to get the drain tube in her armpit wet, I was surprised that I did not feel relieved to finally be helping. My childhood house is old, the kitchen sink knobs fiddly. The hot knob turns one way, and the cold another. I still don’t know which one goes which way. My mother bent over the sink with a nubby grey towel draped around her neck. I gently pushed her head under the water and tried to adjust the temperature. With jitters in my stomach, I frantically turned the knobs in every direction. My mother yelped, popped her head upward and whacked it on the arm of the faucet. She pressed her palm to her scalded bruised skull.
I watched her clench her teeth, then say softly without looking at me, I’ll just do it myself. My throat tightened and I suppressed my tears like a guilty child.
When the cancer came back a second time almost twelve years later, I tried to convince my mother to take a bath. It was difficult for me to see my always stylish mother not notice or care that she was wearing the same stained tee shirt and sweats for days on end. I needed to act.
She had always loved baths. The way our house was laid out, when I was young and tucked into my little twin bed and my mother was in the tub with the bathroom door open, we could see each other from either end of the hallway. I would watch my mother sink into the bath, her long lean frame folding neatly into the narrow porcelain basin. She would settle against the back of the tub and look down the hall at me, snug under a thick blue and yellow comforter. She would place her hand near her cheek, tuck her thumb into her palm and wave her four other fingers slightly toward me with a cupped hand. I would do the same gesture back—a dipping curling signal between mother and daughter, rooms apart.
It was hard to convince my mother about the bath now, though. She didn’t want to get wet or be cold, and she didn’t know if she could get in, nor out.
I bathed a week or two ago, my mother said. People wash themselves too much these days. When I was growing up, we only took a bath once a week.
With much coaxing, I finally managed to convince her that the hot water would feel good. I settled her down into the tub. My mother’s body was now far from long and lean. It was skeletal. I turned my sadness down, way down, so it wasn’t there at all, really. I used the hand-held sprayer to wash my mother’s hair, this time with perfectly heated water. She leaned against the back of the tub and closed her eyes for a minute. I sat on the toilet watching her, closer, so much closer than my little twin bed, still there, down the hall.
When it was time to get out, my mother surprised us both with her strength, saying, Wait, let me try.
Managing to tuck one leg somewhat awkwardly under herself and grasp the metal bar attached to the outer lip of the tub, she pressed herself to standing with only minor under-arm support. But as strong as my mother was, she was physically frail. I held in frightened tears, locked my breath. Just don’t break her, I admonished myself silently.
Here is where the scene slows down. I am toweling off my mother’s body.
She says, My feet. The tops of my feet.
I look down at my mother’s still beautiful feet and see a scattering of water droplets along her tall, lovely arches. Bending down toward the droplets, I softly pat the white towel across the top of her feet. As I stand, she yanks the towel from my hand, bracing herself stiffly with one hand on the edge of the sink.
She stoops over and roughly wipes the tops of her feet over again, saying, You got to get the tops of the feet really good. No one likes wet feet.
I couldn’t help my mother. It was unnatural. A mother is supposed to do the mothering, not the daughter. This was our mistake. Instead of sending tiny waves to each other, we were trying, and failing, to cleanse ourselves of looming loss. But that’s like asking waves to crash into the sea rather than onto shore. The loss was coming one way or another, clean hair and skin be damned.
In the end, the real end, I bathed my mother’s body in warm water and lavender oil as she lay in her brass bed, her feet at the head and her head at the foot. Somehow in the night she had turned herself upside down—an appropriate shift for moving from life to death. A cello concerto blasted through our house, thick loops of sound dancing from room to room and down the hall, as I dipped a soft cloth into the aromatic liquid and gently covered her head to toe.
Cover photo by Leo Bayard on Unsplash
About the Author
Arianne MacBean is a Certified Somatic Psychotherapist and Associate Marriage Family Therapist in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a BA in Dance from UCLA, a Double MFA in Dance & Writing from California Institute of the Arts, and an MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her writing has been published by the academic journal Dance Chronicle as well as Feminism and Religion and Nasty Women Writers Project. Her children’s book, The Backyard Fairies is available on Amazon.
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