I Wish You Could Have Known Her

I stand in the large, stark bathroom, watching as the skilled nurses take care of my mother in hospice. Their deft, practiced movements with daily personal maintenance; all performed with gloved hands. A quick swipe here, maybe a second one there, and then they return her quickly to bed, no words, no eye contact. It's an assembly line process.

They do an exemplary job, beyond adequate. Doling out a required service with a level of aptitude that allows them to move quickly on to the next four rooms in my mother's unit, following the same steps. They manage to do in ten minutes what would take me at least half an hour.

With the two of them together, they lean in to assist my mother with her undergarments, they pull up what needs to be pulled up, and I watch.

All the while I bite my lip, chastising myself for not saying something. I finally open my mouth to speak, but my eyes fill with tears that surprise me and my voice cracks. I stop. Embarrassing myself, fearing I'll move my mother to even more emotion than what I already see there on her face, during what is now surely a humbling season of life for her.

As the three of us stand over my mother in the open bathroom, I feel pressed to tell them that who they see before them today is not an elderly woman no longer able to care for herself, but someone else.

I want them to know, I want to say, I wish you could have known her when she was 30.

* * * 

I wish you could have known her when she was 30. 

She was beautiful. She wrote poetry for the newspaper of her country's capital, Bogota, Colombia, a city even then of over 500,000. Her columns penned anonymously, all beginning with the same three words, A Mi Amante. To My Lover.

Dodging her way through the crowded streets of Colombia she heads to work, amid the honking and the whiz of electric rail cars. The men sitting at the early morning cafe tables look up to see a woman in the business district, working in a place and in a time when women didn't. With her strong straight as an arrow spine and her eyes set ahead, she maneuvers through the busy avenues, always intent in her destination. Tugging at the back hem of her custom made suits, her short, polished nails smooth the placket of buttons. Her platform heeled shoes made especially for her of stiffened leather by the town's cobbler click along the brick walkways. She didn't have to state her independence, you read it in her deliberate stride as she wove her way somewhere, to meet with the town's mayor, or an appointment for dinner with one of many friends. Anyone hoping to catch her would have been long ago lost in the pace she set.

She walks through the streets and the people part, as if she were Moses and they the Red Sea. The traffic stopping on the power of her perfect face alone. The vision that she is holds them; her rich, dark curls that play on her shoulders, her cinched waist in her tailored jackets, her shoes in the latest style with cherry red tips of manicured toes peeking out. Youthful lips that need no rouge sit below incendiary eyes. There are all these things to her, but they disappear from sight the moment she catches your breath with a flash of her eyes that burn with a fire that dares you to stop her.

"Hola, morena! Over here, my dark one," the men shout as she rushes past, "Look at me! Lend me your eyes to light my cigarette."

***

I want to tell these nurses that she will always be titanium -- but instead the hot tears filling my eyes spill off my cheeks and soak into my mother's bent gowned shoulder, and the only thing they hear me say before my voice breaks is, "I wish you could have known her..."

I did. And she was beautiful.

* * *