COMING HOME

I brought my mother home from the recovery hospital.  Checking out is like taking gold from Fort Knox, they don't want you to leave right away.
  They have more papers for her to sign than Carter has little liver pills.  But finally they did release her and I drove my mother home.  She sat in the car, gazing around at a world she had not seen nor been a part of for a long solitary week.  She had been like an underground people, finally seeing the blinding light of day.  She just looked around.  This world had been her home, but she had existed in that hospital, in that bed, in her own place.

 This episode told me how much we are but a slender beat of the heart from an ending.  Not much of tissue, not much of nerve endings, not much of electrical impulses from the mind to the heart.  This had been a glimpse of returning from the dead.  Not entirely dead, but much like it.  As much like it as sleep is like extinction, a forgetting, a not knowing, a pause in place.

  When we came to her apartment, she then had to struggle with her own legs covered by wrinkled old skin, stiffened by age and use.  She had to struggle with the coping of age, the slowness she had never known before.

 Now the mountain of mail awaited her in the mailbox.  Stacked together in my hand, they were like a book of appointments she will never keep.  Some of them seemed trivial--coupons for diet coke, advertisings,  bills for electricity which she didn't use, travel folders.
  All of these were temporary weights from this world, anvils of the ankle, paths which lead nowhere now.  So much of life is just entertainment, an ending where it does not matter what you do.
  But it was a routine which reminded my mother of what people do, of what they are like when they don't come from a hospital.  They were the tasks of the normal life to which she now returned.
  This is coming home.