Learning to Hear Their Voices

In the spring of 2008, four months after my mom's diagnosis with ALS, I was already fairly well on my way to what would, over the next three years, become a weekly ritual: Weekends with my elderly parents in a city two hours north of my own home. It was a ritual from which I would learn much, and not all of it based on the suffering of watching my mom slowly have her muscles and her bodily functions torn away from her. I learned the beauty of the Wisconsin countryside in all seasons and weathers of the year. I rediscovered old high school friends who were still living in the small city of my adolescent life. I made new friends. I lost some of my aversion to this small conservative community, but not by any means all of it. And I finally learned a little bit about who my parents were.

So, in April 2008, I took my mom, who was still walking, talking, eating then, whose smile never left her eyes until that last day of her life closed them forever, I took my mom to her first poetry reading. It was a breakfast reading at the Fox Cities Book Festival, and I had tickets for cold eggs and weak coffee at the best hotel in town and to listen to Naomi Shihab Nye read from her then-recent book of poetry, The Words Under the Words.

I don't really know what delighted my mom most: the fact that Naomi poked fun of Republicans in front an audience full of them, the fact that she occasionally let slip a "bad word" in a roomful of devout church-goers, or the fact that she was there, in a hotel conference room with me, her renegade artistic daughter. Realize please, that we are talking about a woman nearly eighty, who came home from teaching school one day in the 1970s, giggling because one of her students, a farm child, had used the word "teats" when talking about his cow, "right there in the classroom." My mom, you might rightfully conclude, led an extremely sheltered life. Remarkably, even as ALS had its unstoppable way with her, she continued to live as if she was still the most blessed person on the planet. And now, she had poetry, too. For the rest of her months on earth, we would share poetry and in doing so, we learned to listen to each other, deeply. Poetry, being at its heart an oral artform, builds this skill in us.

Learning to listen is a rather adult skill. My children, in their twenties, have not really learned it yet, though sometimes I can tell they are starting to see the way to listening. Here is a short (very short: 34 seconds short) YouTube in which the poet who started my mom and me on the path to deep listening speaks about the same subject, though she calls it "Creativity." I hope you'll listen.

And then, since we're visiting what connects us to our parents,here is another poem of Mahmoud Darwish, which graces the cover of a slim volume of Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry, 19 Varieties of Gazelle. It's titled, in translation from the Arabic which was done by Naomi's father, the journalist Aziz Shihab, "To My Mother."

I long for my mother's bread

And my mother's coffee

And my mother's touch

And my childhood grows up

One day following days of patience

And I love my life

Because if I die

My mother's tears will

shame me.