Life lessons from Mom

Here's a condensed excerpt from the book, reprinted with the permission of the author and publisher. Some material will be familiar to Lende fans, as it appeared in columns that ran in the Daily News on April 27 and Oct. 5, 2006.

Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs

Chapter 5

By HEATHER LENDE

(This chapter, which has the same title as the book, recounts how Lende's mother became ill after a long struggle with cancer. Still recovering from her own near-fatal collision with a truck while riding her bicycle, the author traveled to the Lower 48 to take care of her.)

My mother had always been a walker, taking long, hard treks for an hour or two daily. All three of her daughters also favor the brisk walks that the men in our family jokingly compare to the Bataan Death March. One afternoon I realized that they had it wrong. Those long walks weren't death marches. It was my mom's new, short, slow ones that were, and there wasn't anything funny about them.

I left my parents' house in mid-February but my mother's condition worsened. My youngest sister, Suzanne, flew in to help her through a splenectomy. When she needed to return to her younger family, I arrived to help my mother die, or so I thought. But Mom was not interested in dying. In fact she was working as hard as she could at staying alive. There were tests, surgery medications, a ventilator -- everything that doctors and hospitals could do, and all with my mother's blessing. As Travis Reid had said about my own survival, she, too, had the kind of will to live that made her fight death a lot harder than some people would have. I was still not completely recovered from my injuries, and before we drove in to Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan each day to see Mom, I spent the early morning hours furtively trotting, testing my limbs and spirit.

Despite arthritis, my dad also works out every day. All through my mother's hospitalization, he never broke his routine. Maybe Dad's hobbled gait and dogged determination gave me the nerve to try out my running legs. Still, on those mornings, we went our separate ways, both glad for the time outside and that no one was with us to witness the struggle we were having emotionally with Mom's leaving and physically with our own aging and broken bodies.

But the day after my mother died, we wanted to be together; we didn't want to run or walk alone. It was raining and cool that morning. "This would be a good day in Alaska," Dad said, adjusting his baseball cap before we stepped off the porch into the drizzle.

Spring in the Hudson Valley is a gift. Daffodils spill down hillsides in front of old farmhouses and show up in odd places. One yellow bouquet appeared at the base of a lonely telephone pole between two dairy farms, just when I needed them most. Who, I wondered, planted those bulbs, and did she or he know what comfort they'd bring to a stranger years hence?

In New York, I had been spending sleepless nights unable to shake the images of my mother in her last days. She was supposed to die a weathered old gal on the golf course, digging in her garden, or even dozing by the fire after dinner, in a Shetland sweater with a book on her chest. Not all pale and blotchy and hairless in an ugly old hospital gown, with daffodils in a jar on her windowsill. They were meant to brighten up her room, but they looked too out of place surrounded by all that plastic and metal. In the ten days since we had taken my mother off life support, she had tenaciously hung on to life. She never really regained consciousness. She never really spoke. And there was that one eyebrow I told you about, the one that was perpetually raised in a question mark, which gave her a worried look, but that was all. My mother was a lifelong churchgoer, a devout Episcopalian; she believed in Jesus and heaven, all of it. She went to Bible study class and sang in the choir. All I can think of is that maybe there was one thing she had wanted to tell us before she left -- and that's why she had refused to let go. Had she been waiting for something? My mother's heart wouldn't quit even though everything else had.

Running with my dad a few days after my mom died, I asked him if we could add cream to our coffee instead of skim milk or maybe work out a little less because a quick heart attack would be so much kinder than what she went through. "God, no," he said, as we raced to the mailbox - he always sprints at the end. "This isn't about living longer. It's about the quality of life. Besides, it's keeping us both sane."

"Maybe," I huffed, and he picked up the pace even more while going off on a crazy riff about hospitals, doctors, and the creepy palliative care nurse who looked like Morticia Addams. We had to stop because we were laughing so hard that we were crying, or maybe it was the other way around.

After we caught our breath, Dad pointed through the fog toward a pond across the field. A couple of clumps of daffodils bloomed bright yellow. "Your mother made me go down there with her and plant those on a miserable cold day last fall. I said they'd never grow and that it was too late to plant them. We had a big argument about it. But you know your mother. She didn't take no for an answer." We stood there in the wet morning, steaming from the run, quiet for a few minutes. Then my dad took off his cap and wiped sweat or rain or something else from his eyes and said, "It's not like in the movies, is it?"

HEATHER LENDE'S BOOK SIGNING TOUR

Alaska book signings

• May 18, Haines Library, 7:30 p.m.

• May 20, Anchorage, Title Wave Books, 7:30 p.m.

• May 21, Palmer, Fireside Books, 5 p.m.

• June 17, Juneau, Hearthside Books, 6 p.m.

Out-of-state book signings

• May 24, Boulder, Colo., Boulder Book Shop, 7:30 p.m.

• May 25, Denver, Colo., Tattered Cover, 7:30 p.m.

• May 26, Salt Lake City, Utah, King’s English Bookshop, 7 p.m.

• June 1, Lake Forest Park, Wash., Third Place Books, 7 p.m.

• June 2, Bellingham, Wash., Village Books, 7 p.m.

• June 3, Bainbridge Island, Wash., Eagle Harbor Books, 7:30 p.m.

• June 4, Seattle, Wash., Elliott Bay Book Company, 7 p.m.

• June 7, Portland, Ore., Powell’s, 7:30 p.m.

• June 9, Corte Madera, Calif., Book Bassage, 7 p.m.

• June 10, Petaluma, Calif., Copperfield’s Books @ Ribisi Restaurant, noon