SAG/AFTRA/AEA
Embracing the Hour
It was while we were walking that we discovered my mother's cancer had returned. For my youthful 52-year-old mother--with her beautifully tanned and muscled A-1 tennis legs and her biceps bigger than mine--to stop short on our routine walk and clutch her chest in pain, something was profoundly, irrevocably wrong.
"Our walk," as we were wont to call it, started when I was 17 and determined to lose some weight. The route never varied, nor did the time: three and 1/2 miles in exactly an hour, up and down the foothills of our Atlanta suburb, rain or shine. As the weight dropped off, the walk evolved from a physical workout to a spiritual connection. It offered a ritual, an unadulterated hour in which I came to know my mother as a woman and a friend. Over the course of nine years we walked, daily when I was still in high school, picking it up again without missing a step when I was home from college, or from abroad, or for the holidays.
We talked as we walked. And so I learned about my mother's childhood--the summers on the Cape and her housekeeper Bertha who smelled of orange blossoms and whispered "Sweet Jesus" as she trudged her 300 pounds up the stairs; I heard about her father who died when she was 26, about the day Mom told my grandmother that she was going to be a nun, and how, ultimately, she juggled four marriage proposals. She told me about her pregnancies and even recommended a personal lubricant. When it rained on my fresh perm, circa 1988, Mom ran back home to retrieve an umbrella while I sought shelter under a stranger's garage. When it snowed, and we bundled ourselves up beyond recognition, a neighbor stopped and asked if she could give us a ride to whomever's house we were due to clean.
The summer Mom underwent chemotherapy--her last summer--she insisted on walking. We bought a hat with blonde bobbed hair attached to the wide brim just for that purpose. Mom got a kick out of taking it off once we stepped inside our air-conditioned house to reveal her hot, bald head. I was always conscious of my mother's increasing shortness of breath; and I noticed that, for the first time, I had to slow my pace for her. Yet we never considered stopping our walk, only slowing it. Too much was at stake: her ability to walk symbolized her dignity in the face of this disease that stripped her of her hair, her strength, and finally her life. Characteristically, we talked as we walked. But sometimes we sacrificed our pace so she could put her arm around me when I cried. We walked until the cancer cracked her back, a month before she died.
As I was entering the church before Mom's funeral, my childhood schoolmate and neighbor approached me with her mother. Mom and I regularly waved to this mother and daughter when we would see them gardening as we walked by their yard. They told me that after hearing of Mom's death, they had decided to begin walking as they had seen us do for a decade. They wanted to spend special time together, they said, to learn about each other.
I mostly run now. Walking is still too painful; it gives me too much time to wonder what the name of a certain flower is without my mother there to enlighten me. Someday, though, I will walk. And I will tell my daughter all about my best friend, her grandmother.
Featured in the book The Walker Within (Lyons
Press)
First published in Walking Magazine, March 2000
First published in Walking Magazine, March 2000