Yarrow House

Future Conditional

On the day my 93-year-old mother fell and broke her hip and needed a hip replacement, I began to anticipate losing her — statistically a broken hip is a death sentence for the elderly. Although I didn’t know the exact trajectory, I could see the eventual end of her life, likely within the year. But as for when any one particular life will draw to a conclusion, prediction is at best speculation. A year passed, and Mom continued to live.

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The need to pin down the future, wanting to know what’s coming, what will happen, how long it will take, is probably hard-wired into our drive for survival. And not just about life and death. Take the weather, for example. Until the mid-1800s, weather foretelling depended on arthritic joints and the memories of the elderly. Accurate weather forecasting became possible only with the invention of the telegraph in 1837. Before that, the fastest that weather information could travel was by hard-ridden horse, maybe 20 miles in a day. Even the mail carried by Pony Express riders took ten days to go from Sacramento to St. Joseph, on the Missouri River—far too slow to keep up with weather changes coming from the west. The transcontinental telegraph wires with their weather reports from distant places finally allowed meteorological patterns to become evident.

For millennia being able to predict the weather placed successful foretellers with water dowsers and witches, giving them an authority they might or might not deserve. Now, though, anyone with a computer can anticipate the weather real-time. I don’t need to be a witch to guess how the day’s weather will develop. If I want to go work in the yard, I can check the radar online. Are those rain clouds moving toward Seattle? Guess I’d better get out and do some weeding before they arrive. The mystery of weather foretelling has become the science of weather forecasting.

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My hillside backyard has a view across Rainier Valley to Beacon Hill and even to a bit of downtown Seattle. I often lounge at the bottom of the yard on warm summer afternoons, watching chickadees flit from bush to bush, being buzzed by an occasional hummingbird, listening to the breeze ruffle through the cherry tree. I plot new arrangements of plants—maybe a cluster of chartreuse Heuchera in front of that dark-green fern? And what about planting some more lilies for their fragrance? I sit under the apple tree and pretend I’m in an orchard glade and not in the middle of a noisy city.

The block downhill from me is zoned multifamily, and I knew it was only a matter of time before townhouses would start to rise on the vacant lot at the back of my yard. I couldn’t bear the thought of a three-story building looming over me, so in anticipation I planted two shore pines at the property line, hoping they’d grow fast enough to hide whatever new buildings sprouted.

When I arrived in Seattle in 1974, the city’s population hovered around 500,000 and stayed there well into the 1990s. But since then the influx of people coming to work for software and biotech companies has pushed the population over 700,000 and climbing. By the mid 2010s, overnight it seemed, the buildings in the Valley had changed from peaked roofs bungalows to flat-topped boxes— rows of townhouses and piles of apartments. When they founded Seattle in 1851, Yesler, Denny, and the other early settlers envisioned their village growing into a grand city on the Puget Sound. Later residents began to dread that sprawling growth. In the 1970s, Seattle newspaper columnist Emmett Watson promoted a tongue-in-cheek organization called Lesser Seattle, to counter local businessmen’s drive for unfettered expansion. Watson railed against the change from small city to a megalopolis, guessing where we were headed, and now that tidal wave of development is here.

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Mom had a stroke a week after her hip replacement, which affected the language areas of her brain. She returned home from the care center struggling to find words and complete sentences. I wanted to talk with her about how she felt with death looming on the horizon but she wasn’t interested in an end-of-life conversation even if she could have found the words. Talking about feelings wasn’t something we did very often in our family. And besides she had a project she was determined to complete—compiling a collection of anecdotes and stories from her six years as a public health nurse in Liberia in the 1970s. Even though she could probably see her end sometime not too far in the future, it wasn’t here yet, and she had a life to go on living.

I was the oldest daughter, as was my mother. Growing up on a farm, I learned from her how to plant and preserve vegetables, make jam, sew my own clothes, make do with what we had. I tangled with her stubbornly in my teenage years. She had expectations of me, and I countered with criticisms of her. I suspected she worried and fussed about the future, but whatever misfortunes happened, she was most likely to say, “This too shall pass.” I disapproved of her passivity, as it seemed to me, but I’ve finally come to redefine her passivity as patience and that, as a way of getting through hard times, patience isn’t such a bad approach.

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Foretelling the weather has probably been on people’s minds since they had minds to notice and the language to recount it. That we can now predict the weather so accurately is astounding. As I watch a kettle of cherry jam come to a full, rolling boil, I imagine the earth’s atmosphere swirling like the jam, around the globe over all kinds of terrain, warmed and cooled by daily and seasonal changes. Predicting where any little chunk of cherry will end up sounds easy compared, say, to predicting the swirling path of a rain storm moving across the Pacific Ocean.

In 600 BC, Thales, a Greek meteorologist of sorts, issued the first seasonal crop forecasts. When his detractors claimed that his weather forecasts were of little practical use, he decided to demonstrate just how practical they could be. Anticipating a bumper crop of olives in the coming year, he cornered the market on olive presses, charged exorbitant rates for their rental, and became wealthy by the end of the season. Then he sold the presses and continued on with his life as a philosopher of natural science.

The weather is a minor problem for home gardeners like me. But for farmers, it’s a gambling game with low predictability. Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus, compiled a book on weather foretelling, called the Book of Signs, that was consulted for the next 2000 years by farmers, seafarers, generals, and anyone else whose life or livelihood could be disrupted by bad weather. The Farmer’s Almanac, our modern equivalent, was a staple on my grandfather’s farm when I was growing up, although its predictions were likely to be no more accurate than those in the Book of Signs. We had our own foretelling methods and would watch Mt. Rainier for pending weather. A cap of clouds over the mountain top usually meant rain was coming. Of course, in Western Washington, rain is always coming, sooner or later.

Gardening is the perfect activity for learning to balance pessimism and optimism. Every year I grow a garden. I plant little dried-up seeds, believing they will sprout into pea vines, lettuce, zucchini, and beans. Hope against dread. Did the peas seeds just rot or did the slugs get the sprouts overnight? Every year I have to remind myself that seeds take time to sprout. And neither my dread nor my hope will hasten them.

In the months while my mother recuperated from her hip replacement and stroke, she steadily worked on her collection of anecdotes. She struggled to express herself, to finish the stories that were so clear in her mind but garbled when she tried to put them into words. By the time she got to the last story she wanted to tell, she couldn’t get it down on paper. She fixated on the opening and kept writing the same sentences or variations of them over and over. Finally I offered to ghost write it for her. She told me, as best she could, the experience she wanted to describe—walking along a jungle path one night to a little village to examine a dead man for possible signs of smallpox. She wasn’t one to focus on herself, and her aphasia made her even less forthcoming about her role in this public health adventure. I suggested what I thought she was trying to describe and guessed at the point she wanted to make. She guided me—or fended off my suggestions— as best she could. I wrote the story I thought she would have written. It sounded like her, and even though I wanted to weave in more of how she felt about her experience, she was satisfied with it as it was.

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I had often said that Rainier Valley needed more density in order to support decent shopping and infrastructure, but I just didn’t anticipate what that would feel like when the wave of urbanization overtook my backyard. On the vacant lot below my house, the day of reckoning finally came. An excavator showed up and began clearing and leveling the site. My shore pines were still just spindly sticks no more than eight or nine feet tall. As the work progressed, I was surprised to see the excavator scrape clear the alley easement that buffered our two properties. Gone were the maples that I’d expected to provide some additional screening. My foresight had helped me prepare for buildings I knew would be tall but I hadn’t taken into account the removal of the trees in the alley. My little backyard glade had become completely exposed.

On the day the excavator scraped the alley easement down to the dirt, I surveyed the barren ledge he left behind, bemoaning the loss of the trees. I didn’t want to do any permanent planting until the buildings were put in. All I could do was think about where to put new trees, and in the meantime cover the bare slope with mulch to protect it from erosion. I watched the construction with a mix of curiosity at the building process itself and frustration at how the buildings did indeed not only destroy my view but loom over my yard. I feared I would never be able to recreate the little backyard haven I’d once had.

Preparing for an inevitable future while not losing my footing in the present is a continual balancing act. Yes, I anticipated the appearance of tall buildings, but for the present I would do well to enjoy my glorious lilies, pause to savor their fragrance wafting through the yard, sit back and listen to leaves rustle in the breeze.

Anticipating a parent’s death is fraught with guilt. My magical-thinking child springs to life, fearing that the thought might cause the event. I know staying present is important in dealing with my mother, but so often all that means is that I’ve just gone numb to how I feel about her situation. I teeter on the edge of a well of sadness at the thought of the loss of her in my life, even though by now, six years after her stroke, her presence is as much a burden as a pleasure. I don’t want to feel impatient or angry. I don’t want to feel this storm of emotions. I want to not feel, but I’m a feeling being; I can’t be a stone as she moves through the ending of her life. So I say “be present,” and I mean it. But at the same time, how can I bear to endure this constant wash of conflicting feelings?

I once asked my mother how she had felt at the loss of her mother, who had lived with my parents the last five years of Grandma’s life. Mom said that by the time her mother died, she had grieved so fully that at the end there wasn’t much of a sense of loss. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. Over these past six years, I’ve repeatedly said goodbye to her. The day she takes her last breath will not be momentous in terms of loss, only in terms of finality.

After mom’s hip replacement, my sister and I tried to talk with our parents about where they wanted to move when the time came that they couldn’t live independently. They didn’t want to talk about moving. Then Mom’s health collapsed, and suddenly she needed care around the clock. We found an adult group home with an opening and were able to move her within days. I keep expecting life to provide neat and tidy endings, but the end of mom’s story has no tidy wrapping up of themes and plot twists. It trails off slowly, with an epilogue to the epilogue.

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I knew my mother was going to die; I just didn’t expect my father to precede her. Who we fundamentally are emerges in full flower in our old age. We lose our filters. Mom became hypercritical of my father. By the end of their 75 years of marriage, their unresolved issues had begun to haunt them. Their roles reversed as a result of mom’s reduced physical and verbal capacity. I wanted to help, but nothing I could do would change the fact that now, my father had to be the person who kept their conversations going and dealt with bureaucrats. Now, mom had to let him be in charge. In their 90s, the change was often too much for them, but they endured because that’s how they did their lives. None of us had foreseen how much their relationship, once adventurous and loving, would become a source of daily irritation. My father had often said he was only sticking around to take care of my mother, and less than two months after she moved to the group home, he had a heart attack, closed his eyes in mid-sentence, and departed.

Mom continues to slowly dwindle away, apparently not in a hurry to leave this earth. At 99, she sleeps much of the time, hardly ever even trying to speak, unable to answer my questions. I will never know now if she and Dad regretted not having a son, or why they decided to go to Africa, or how she happened to choose my name. She’s still as mysterious to me as she was when I was a teenager, a person I will never completely know.

Once a week my husband and I drive 60 miles to visit her, never knowing if she’ll wake for us or engage with us while we’re there. Sometimes she stares off into space and seems indifferent to our presence. Other times she watches us talk. Her aphasia traps her in a wordless world. For whatever mysterious stirring of her energy, she is sometimes more present when we visit. Some months ago, when I kissed her cheek and told her how much I loved her, she returned my kiss and croaked out, “I feel the same.” They were the first words she’d spoken in many months, and the last since then. I cherish that brief moment of connection when we spoke our love to each other.

Her quality of life seems minimal, but she’s peaceful and not in pain, and who am I to say that the personal work she’s doing now isn’t of value to her, and even to us, as we continue with her down this path. On my best days, I simply hold her hand while she sleeps, witnessing this long slow end of her life. Each day she continues to live, each visit I make, I have an opportunity to explore my relationship with her, to puzzle over the purpose or utility of this slow lingering, as she dreams her way into her death or finishes with whatever it is that keeps her here. How will I feel when she’s gone? I can’t guess, although I know I’ll feel something. My father and I had a distant relationship so I was surprised at how I sobbed in my husband’s arms when I learned of Dad’s death. I wouldn’t have predicted my response, just as I can’t predict my response to my mother’s eventual death.

Life is a flame that burns as long as there is fuel for it. And as for its purpose? I continue to ask the question, even though the answer remains opaque. A flame eventually gutters out. It goes nowhere. It merely ceases. My mother will die, become a memory for a generation or two, and then vanish completely. All that will remain of her are her values passed on through family and friends, and the habitual gesture or genetic feature that ripples through generations, unrecognized but still potent.

My mother has survived long beyond the one year I’d anticipated. And so it goes. All my anticipation of loss, for naught. The only moment I have is this moment, and all I can do is look just far enough ahead to set things in motion for a conditional future. Plant some trees. Take an umbrella. Love my mother for who she has been in my life and for who she is now, even as she slowly disappears.

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One-time reproduction for non-resale purposes permitted with the following credit line: by Judith Yarrow, © 2019