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It’s been a challenging week.

I took Saturday off from going to visit Mama, having worked all day for my sister, who was out of town for the weekend. I call to check on her in the evening as I’m fixing my dinner. An aide answers the phone and says she isn’t feeling well and knowing her history of bowel obstructions had called for a hospice nurse to come.

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The reader boards on the 30-mile stretch of I-5 I travel each Thursday to attend my yoga class, warned last week of high volume traffic and delays over the weekend. Saturday, as I drove on the frontage road parallel to the interstate on my way to visit Mama, the I-5 traffic was heavy and slow. Why? Travelers heading to the tiny town of Madras, Oregon—and other small Oregon towns—to view the total eclipse of the sun.

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We had another scare last week, and were so grateful to be able to request a hospice nurse as night approached. I can’t say enough about hospice. My dad used to off-key sing, “If I had a million bucks, I’d give it all to you.” If I had a million bucks, I’d give it to hospice, and the Washington Trails Association. But that’s another story.

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I’m practicing listening to my mother’s complaints as the only way she knows to say she is afraid; that this getting old stuff is super scary. Usually I don’t do well. I hear only the endless dissatisfaction, and I am working so hard not to absorb it myself and to move her on to happier ground, that I don’t address the emotion behind the words. Sunday I came close.

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I lie on my double high airbed in my tent with rug and writing table, looking out the back window over the clear blue-green water of Lake Crescent, the fragrant air passing through the screened openings. And I know.

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That’s the phrase I heard from my mother in cross-country phone greeting throughout my adulthood, ad nauseam. I don’t know why it annoyed me so much, except that my mother annoyed me. Maybe I never felt free to say, “I am not feeling smiley today. I AM NOT SMILING TODAY!” It’s who she wanted—needed—me to be.

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Mama’s memory is on the decline. Of course memory loss is gradual for all of us, but in old age it seems to drop, plateau, repeat. Over the past five years in close proximity with her, at first I noticed it occasionally and in tiny ways. Then more often. Then occasionally Rebecca or I would say, “Wow, she didn’t remember that?” Then there were more of those episodes.

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