A couple times a year I take down the box of my late mother’s clothes and unpack it. Inside is a purple velour skirt suit and a white blouse. This was her favourite outfit, saved for special occasions. After nearly twenty-five years of being boxed away and wrapped in plastic, there is still a faint smell of her. I’m always careful to not keep it out too long for fear her scent might dissipate. The elastic band on the waist of the skirt is brittle and has no give. But the fabric remains in good shape, the colour vibrant.

I can remember clear as day her putting on this suit for my first communion. She moved differently in it, a bit surer of herself, knowing it brought out the green in her eyes as they sparkled with pride. My mother was a deeply devout woman, her faith meant everything to her, as did our language and culture. On this day, I imagine, she felt she was upholding the tenets of our existence. I was too young to understand the significance of this religious ritual, and rather did as I was told, as opposed to knowingly choosing this path for my own future.

But I digress…

 A few weeks ago, on what would have been her sixty-ninth birthday, I once again opened this box and buried my face in its contents. I inhaled deeply, my eyes closed, feeling her beside me. The things I have which belonged to my mother would fit in an office carton; the pictures aren’t too many either. She lived and died before we had the means to take photos without thinking about how much the film or developing would cost. Capturing images of our early life was limited to a few times a year, very special occasions.

So to see her, to hear her voice, I go into my memories… memories which can sometimes feel like a minefield, pain being part of so many moments. I fear that with time I might start to forget her, although I haven’t yet, as I visit her often.

When I laid down on the carpet, resting my face against her clothes, I was reminded of when I bathed her once, as I did many times, in the months before her death.

I had no awareness of death then… its permanence, how everything and nothing would change in an instant. And that she’d never come home again… in fact, that she was my home, not the structure, the walls, the furniture, but her. She was what I lived within, sheltered to the best of her ability from life, my innocence still mostly intact, under her care.

The memory, the bathing…

The water reached just beyond the top of her thighs, her legs outstretched and motionless. She sat upright in the tub facing the faucet, shoulders curled in, chin dropped. The pose itself cried of exhaustion, but she was so much more than tired. She knew it was a matter of months, not years, months, until she’d be gone.

She lifted a sponge and ran it delicately over her arms, from the inner elbow to her fingertips. Every contact with her body hurt, her skin paper thin and scaly. Despite this, the sensations of the rough sponge and the warm water that seeped from it were welcomed. There was no way to be painless, so she chose where she’d feel it, whenever such a choice was possible.

Her pelvis was immersed, as was much of the loose skin that hung from her belly. Her stomach had expanded and shrunk many times, with each of her five children, and the yoyoing of her weight. Now she was at her slimmest in decades, something she hadn’t been able to accomplish through dieting. The figure she coveted became possible as she began dying, being eaten from the inside by her cancer.  

The track of healed stitches that ran the entire length of her body’s trunk, from her collarbone, between her breasts and through her belly button, ended at the pelvic bone. There was a red center line where they had cut her open. It was flagged on each side by rows of dots, the poke holes of staples. She has been stapled back together after much of her large intestines, her stomach, and many other tumor-infested organs had been removed. She was mostly hollow, except for her heart and lungs, little else remained.

‘Dorotko’, her faint voice carried form the bathroom to my room. ‘Dorotko, choc i umyj mi plecy.’ [Come and scrub my back.]

A minute later, fifteen-year-old me appeared in the bathroom doorway. The sight of my naked mother was familiar. I had changed her surgical dressings, moved her from side to side in her bed, sponge bathed her, placed the bedpan under her, dressed and undressed her many times. I knew her body through every surgery and with each new scar.

Despite my occasional desire to be like every other teen and hang out at the mall, I didn’t mind being one of my mother’s caregivers. Those moments were special because they were just ours. It meant my father, aunties, and siblings were occupied elsewhere and not likely to interrupt us. When I was asked to be my mother’s nurse, we had shifts assigned, it gave me, the middle child, the undivided attention I often desperately craved.

Hearing my mother’s voice, I came right away. I approached the bathroom quietly, seeing the door was open, and peaked around the corner. Unconsciously, I memorized the scene; the beige bathtub, its aluminum-framed sliding glass doors, the door tracks, my naked mother sitting in shallow water, her body folding onto itself, her bald head, and translucent skin.

‘Tak Mamo’ [Yes], I answered, drawing my mother’s attention away from the faucet. Once she turned her head towards me, the blank look on her face quickly disappeared. She smiled, her green eyes filled with life. She was happy to see me and I her. I felt so loved in that moment because of the way she looked at me.

Unconsciously, I burned that day into my memory.

A living memory, like a video but with feelings and smells. I recorded my mother’s movements, the look of joy that erupted on her face the moment she saw me in the doorway. I recorded the feeling inside me, knowing I had brought her momentary happiness. I recorded the sound of the water as my mother raised her hand from below the water’s surface and held out the sponge in my direction. I recorded the smell of the damp towels that hung on the bar and the fragrance of the soap.   

I walked over to the tub and knelt beside it. I pushed my sleeves above my elbows and took the sponge from my mother’s hand. The water was barely lukewarm, but I said nothing about it, assuming my mother wanted the low temperature to numb her skin. With my other hand I grabbed the soap and lathered the sponge. Starting at the back of my mother’s neck, as I had been taught from a very young age, I scrubbed lightly side to side. My mother dropped her chin to her chest, exposing her spine, while her mouth released a faint groan. I knew the scrubbing was painful but I also knew not to stop. The abrasive cleaning, however delicate, was transferring my mother’s pain from elsewhere. This meant, as my mother had told me many times before, that some other part of her body was released from agony. She often said, the brain is unable to manage so much suffering at once, it has to choose one location.  

I ran the sponge down my mother’s spine, circled over each shoulder blade, then scooped more water returning to her lower back.

‘Mocniej’ [Harder], my mother said, ‘szoruj jak podloge’ [scrub like the floor]. Her voice sounded cheery when she mentioned the floor. We laughed together.

This was our inside joke, the same one my grandmother had made many times, about scrubbing someone’s back like you scrub the floors; vigorously. Many of the women in our family liked their backs scrubbed until the skin became an angry red, almost to the point of discomfort, hard enough to draw the blood to the surface. I often thought it was a way of toughening the skin and toughening the spirit. As though it made pain into something each of us could learn to endure, almost learn to enjoy. We weren’t bred for comfort; we were raised to be workhorses to the bitter end.

Besides giving me instructions of what to wash and how, my mother and I said little else to each other. I repeatedly dipped the sponge, rinsing away the soap, letting it drink up clean water. Then I suspended my hand at the top of her back and squeezed the sponge empty. I watched the waterfall cascade down her body, washing away any bubbles that remained.

When my mother’s back was clean, I took a small washcloth, wet it, and gently wiped her head. Several rounds of aggressive chemotherapy meant she had no hair to wash, but I knew that her scalp was irritated by the elastic band of her wig and by the heat that couldn’t escape through the plastic hair strands. My mother’s wig was donated, it was not real hair, it didn’t match her skin tone or her eye colour. But it was all she had, so she wore it whenever she left home. I saw her scratching behind her ears and along her forehead many times. I thought that maybe wiping her scalp with cool water would help to ease the burning.      

My mother, who had returned to facing the faucet when I began washing her, once again turned to face me. She smiled and looked as though she was going to speak. But before she could say anything, I rinsed the washcloth and began wiping her face. I placed the soft cloth on her forehead and slowly pulled it along each side, over her temples, along the curve of her cheekbone, into the wells where once rosy, fleshy cheeks had been. My mother closed her eyes and so I wiped the lids, along the outsides of them, and into the corners. Tears rolled down her face, but before she opened her eyes, my mother forced a smile and recomposed herself.

We looked at each other.

I remember still feeling hopeful that my mother would beat cancer again.

I know now that she likely already knew her life was coming to an end, and yet was expertly hiding her pain from me.