She’s in Another Dimension

“She’s in another dimension.” Marita, the hospice nurse, just came and checked  on my mom.

She showed me the creeping bruises on Mom’s arms, the shallow breathing, the cool hands and the lapses in breath. “Yes,” I repeated back to Marita, “She’s in another dimension.”

Earlier, when I had walked into Mom’s room, I was stunned by the change of 3 days. Her head was characteristically tilted to her right shoulder, but the angle was too sharp, too stiff. Her jaw hung wrong. She was so pale. And her soft brown eyes, so predictably attentive to me, were filmed and focused elsewhere.

I spoke, told her who I was. She blinked. ‘Are you in there, Mom?’ I wondered.

Yes, I definitely saw her eyebrow raise. It was that slight twinkle/twitter thing that she does. Funny, I’ve never put words to that expression before. Yet I realize now how much I search for that confirming greeting. Whenever I go to see her, I expect and want it. I even compete for it.

For that matter, when I walk into any room with anybody, I work  for it. ‘There you are,’ her eyebrow says. Because she believes ‘that I am there’, then I believe it too. At least for a little while,  I say to myself, ‘I am.’

It was her face, after all, her little twinkle/twitter eyebrow thing  that was my first experience of being told that I am real.  Her face suggested to me that I have a face. Her flashes and flickers taught me that I flash and flicker.  My mom’s body literally transported me into this dimension of real. Then her face confirmed it with a thousand greetings.

But mom isn’t exactly inside her face now. Yes I saw the remnant of the twinkle/twitter, but Mom’s eyes are focused elsewhere. Mom is partly elsewhere. She is being transported to another dimension, where the great ‘I AM’, the great Twinkle/Twitter  will greet her and shout, “There you are!”

Mom, who gave me generous tastes of that greeting, will soon have the real thing.

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