FALL 2001
Mary Waddington
Salem MM[The following is Mary’s journal entry for 27 April 1998,
during the last months of her mother’s, Mabel Waddington’s, life—Ed.]
It was early, but the birds had been up well before us. Mother was looking smaller than ever sitting in her wheelchair. I pushed her to my screen door for the view and the cool morning air, and it was then that she smelled the wisteria. Its aroma awakened something within her, a cellular memory etched in a childhood of playing under the trellis of her mother's wisteria vines.
That will be the bouquet, she told me with certainty. It was our turn to supply the flowers for meeting, my turn actually, but we had always gathered the flowers together. I was surprised she had remembered this, being as she was in the final stages, jaundiced now and too weak to be of much help when I lifted her from bed to wheelchair.
The lawn had never been graded and seeded like many we see today. Crab grass grew in thick hummocks, and years of animal diggings and pet burials and stump rottings had left recesses that the wheelchair tipped into. I strained against its handle bars, bent low for leverage, trying ever so hard to prevent jostling. Oblivious now to her ride, she was fixed on the lavender boughs ahead that were bent heavy with intoxicating sweetness. I watched her tiny, frail body lean forward to bring closer a scent and a vision that bridged 80-some years of living and loving and losing.
Mother pointed to the boughs she thought were choice and I cut them off with the clippers. There wasn't much lap, with thighs no bigger than the bones within them and an abdomen bloated way out, but I laid the wisteria there anyway. Each drooping bough she saw looked even more perfect than the last, and so she kept pointing and I kept clipping. Wisteria soon covered the abdomen and flowed up against her chest like a shimmering lavender cloak.
Soft breezes fingered each blossom on their way to our lungs, filling our nostrils with heady perfume and our chests with the balm of Grace. A compassionate sun buried its warmth in our bones and baked out the chill of a cold, harsh prognosis. The heavens dipped down and met us on our own turf. And the alchemy of these intoxicating elements somehow worked within our minds to change Mother's condition from a malignancy to a benign transitioning process.
The invigorating awareness of this moment called for a celebration of movement, and so I maneuvered the wheelchair toward the road and onto a surface so smooth it prompted my feet to run. Our speed caused the breeze to accelerate into a soft wind which tangled our hair and stirred up a frenzy of fragrance that freshened our beings. It mixed itself in with our laughter and cleansed us of the mustiness of impending death. Without effort it lifted us onto its wings. That moment stretched into eternity, and it transitioned us from the restrictions of dying into the freedom of living.
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