Tag

Ice Cream with Carol's Mom

November 19, 1997
It's Carol's 54th birthday and we're at the Southwest Plaza mall. I'll sit here in the Food Court and write. Carol is off with Kristin. They're looking for a nice dress to buy for a party Kristin will attend on Friday night, a party where the ex-boyfriend has announced he will be making an appearance with his new girlfriend. "She's your replacement," he has told Kristin on the telephone. It must have slipped his mind Kristin's the one who dumped his sorry self for just such crass insensitivity. Replacement. What a fool. So, obviously, it is extremely important our lovely daughter be the best looking lady at the ball.

Carol's birthday and she's celebrating by buying Kristin a dress. It takes time but, eventually, some fortunate among us realize the true nature of a gift. Such a wonderful gift Carol will receive when she purchases the trappings of an elegant evening for Kristin.

And my birthday gift for this woman of my life these many years . . . aside from a few do-dads, it hasn't materialized. My plan was to write a piece about her mother. I've worked on it--first as prose, then as a poem, and at best it's proven to be but a disjointed collection of fragments. Perhaps, for the time being, it has to be like this: jotted in notebook form with thoughts released rather than formally composed-- obliquely approached rather than head on. It's the way I deal with the difficulty of so profound an event as the death of a dear person. And with Carol's Mom it's not just the parting, the loss--it's also the dreadful decline of her final months, even years. So much to be said, but first, so much to be confronted. I have yet to tell what I know of my own mother's story—the funny times, the sadness, the love--and its been eleven years since her death. These matters take time to be accepted and even longer to be said.

I realize that at this stage of the matter, rather than writing about Bernice Marie Hollmann Riehl, I, more so than ever during her living days, have begun to speak directly to her. It began when she was dying and I would meditate for her blessed freedom from the agony of the final phases of her Earthly sojourn. I would speak to her soul and say, "Let go, Carol's Mom, let go, bless you, let go," and I would breathe through her frail and time-lost essence and hope her suffering would, at last, cease. Then, on September 16, after eating a good dinner at the home, she laid down, and after a thank-God brief struggle, died there in the hospital bed we had rented for her.

Her real bed, the one we had hauled out to Colorado from St. Louis seven years prior, with the decline of her health had been disassembled and stored in the basement. That bed had a history. It was the same bed she had shared with Mr. Riehl for years that were so wonderful she would speak of them in a hush of joy; the bed where later she and Carol and I would crowd on a Sunday night's visit and watch her color television and keep the call of Monday at bay for a few more hours of safety; the bed where one night she and Carol, propped on pillows, heads a-tilt toward the heavens, and hearts wide open, sang in warbling falsetto the "Indian Love Call" like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald had never heard; and, most recently, the bed upon which she and I would sit facing the wall of her small room and eat the marvel of Dairy Queen ice cream sundaes together when no other closeness was possible.

After knowing her for most of my life; knowing her through my elementary school years, my teen-awkward early years; knowing her as my disappointed mother-in-law, “Well, Carol, if you marry him you know he'll probably just grow another beard and ride off on a motorcycle,” for which I could hardly blame her, none of the three of us was certain she wasn't right about me; knowing her through the years as Kristin's grandmother who, with knitted booties and stocking caps,wove her heart about the fragile early times of Kristin's difficult promise and who, in ensuing years, was ever there

to cheer Kristin's triumphs over the bleak prophesies of her birth; knowing these final years when it was no longer she who was loving steward to her daughter and, in cruel reversal, Carol had taken on the most difficult role of becoming parent to her own mother; after all these decade's worth of acquaintance, it was when, as we sat upon the edge of that ancient bed together--with her frail beyond hope of ever leaving the confines of the assisted care facility, with memory lost to but fleeting recollection of a past that had become tiles of a shattered mosaic--in those final interludes with small paper cups of chocolate-covered ice cream eaten with red plastic spoons, in the absolute truth of how honestly divine was the taste of those moments, I was, at last, able to find expression for my affection for the lady whom for forty-five years I had thought of as “Carol's Mom.”

"It's good, isn't it--the ice cream?" I would ask with all the reach of my heart for the simple realm of cool smooth flavor and texture we experienced together. "Isn't this wonderful ice cream?"

And, with eyes warm and welcoming she would say,"Oh, yes, Robert. This is wonderful ice cream."

So it is, on this day when I should be giving gifts, it is I who received them: the gift of Carol and Kristin out there somewhere in the vast expanse of this mall purchasing dignity and revenge in the form of a beautiful dress; the daily gift of having their love; and the gift of knowing when I speak to the spirit of my mother-in-law and say, "Bless you, Carol's Mom. Bless you," that somewhere in the haze of those parting days, Carol's Mom had tasted with me the miracle of ice cream shared, and I, the bearded son-in-law, had known the acceptance of her heart.