Edges

My nephew, a photographer, got me thinking about edges.

There are lots of kinds of edges.

A frame forms an edge around a photograph or painting. There is the margin at the edge of the page separating where words are and where they are not. There is the edge of a knife, used to cut something into two pieces, thus creating two more edges.

There are edges that nature creates. As a geologist I am intrigued by the color changes in rocks which often mark the edge between what came before and what came after. The rough or smooth edge of a leaf or a blade of grass. There is the thin edge between the bark and the pulp of a tree. There are wide or gradual edges such as the edge of a meadow where grass fades to woods.

Edges separate land from sea, sea from sky. Sunlight from shadow. Day from night and night from day.

There are edges we humans create, the fence to keep animals in or the No Trespassing sign to keep humans out. Sometimes nature ignores these edges. Sometimes humans do too.

Yesterday was October 15, which reminded me of another edge, that between life and death. On October 15, 2022 my mother passed across the edge separating life from death. This edge would seem quite sharp and an edge that you do not cross back over. One minute she was alive and the next she was not. One minute there was breath, a heartbeat, and then there was not. One moment I could have spoken to her and waited for a response, maybe imagined that she heard me, and the next moment I would have been speaking to myself. One moment she was with is, the next she was not.

But a long illness dulled that edge, slowly taking from her, and from us, that which was truly alive. For years she was a shell of who she was in life. Once energetic, interesting, funny, she became less so, walking more slowly, talking and laughing less. I would never say that she was more dead but certianly she was less alive.

In the days after my mother passed, we, my sister, father and I, did what we thought she would have wanted. We went on. She did not need her clothes so we cleaned out her bureau sorting that which would go in the trash from that which could go to Goodwill. We laughed when we discovered that she had secretly stashed money in several of her socks. Rolls of twenty-dollar bills. Thousands of dollars in total. Whether that was the eccentric woman I knew as a child or the forgetful and nervous woman she became, I will never know.

In the weeks following I visited my father and at the end of each visit I took with me a few boxes of mom’s things in a continuing effort to sort trash from treasure, to move on. The closet is mostly empty now.

Since she has passed, I have become frustrated with the challenge of remembering who she was before she began her decline. My memories are too often of sitting with her, listening as she tried in vain to recall the name of a childhood friend, as she tried to read or do simple math, holding her arm as we walked ever so slowly around the block. Toward the end we no longer walked, instead we sat while others walked around the block and she asked repeatedly where they were, worried that they might not return. Those were my memories of her.

On the anniversary of her passing my sister recorded some of her memories of when mom was alive, really alive, and circulated the recording to family. My sister reminded us who mom really was. When she kayaked, hiked and camped. When she taught skiing and refereed field hockey games. When she ate fish cheeks because they were the sweetest part of the fish and when she cleaned a beef bone to the point that a hungry dog would turn it down. When she took photographs and wrote books. When she laughed and when she swore, raising all five fingers because she could not remember which one you raised when you were mad at someone. My mother returned as who she was in life, replacing the frail women who, in my memory, she had become.

In thinking about edges, I would have considered the edge between life and death to be an edge you only cross in one direction, from the living to the dead. My sister’s memories taught me that it is an edge one can come back across, and I am grateful to my sister for that and grateful to have my mother alive again.

Afterword: With A Pic and Some Words I try to select one picture. These are some other edges that same to mind.