I arrived in Pittsburgh in time to see the sun setting over the western hills. Everything looked beautiful in the dusk, even the lifeless retaining pond.
I came to Pittsburgh to help move my mother to a new apartment in ‘assisted living,’ where she would (hopefully) get more help. Over the past year, her fading memory means that she often forgets to do things. And not just small things, like plugging in her phone, but also big things, like going to the dining hall to eat dinner. She could be on her way out the door and forget where she’s going and end up on the couch for the next however many hours. It was unclear to us how she was spending her days. But then again, I thought, who really knows how anyone else spends their days? The passage of time can be a horrible mystery.
For a long time, my siblings and I were worried that moving to Assisted Living would be hard on my mother because it would mean abandoning many of the people and activities she liked in her current apartment.
I kept saying that she would miss her garden, but I was probably projecting because I had spent so much time over the past decade planting and maintaining it. I thought about how one day I would have to say goodbye to my own garden. I remembered reading a book by two gay men who had spent fifty years creating a beautiful garden and how they had resigned themselves to saying goodbye by reasoning that it is ‘the process and not the result.’ I knew it was a good way to think about the inevitable but it didn’t make me look forward to the day it happens.
I had taken my mother to a nursery for Mother’s Day in 2023, when her mind was still good. We had bought plants and she had professed joy and happiness at the result while taking care to make many notes: ‘Do you think that plant might look better over there?’ or ‘Is something sticking out behind the fern? What is that?’ But I know she loved sitting on her patio and watching the sunlight filter through the leaves as her mind slowly gave way.
Moving required a significant downsizing, which meant throwing away a lot of stuff. There’s nothing like moving, I thought, to be confronted with the worst elements of our materialistic culture. We buy things and then we reach an age where we have to get rid of them. Some people, I learned from a random woman at the front desk, try to guilt their children into taking all of it. ‘You’re just like my children,’ she said. ‘They don’t want anything!’ ‘We took a few things!’ I objected. One of my longstanding weaknesses is that I will argue with anyone. At least I resisted the temptation to explain that most of this garbage will be transported to a landfill where it will remain until the sun explodes or the earth is decimated by an asteroid, at which point the trash will be released to float in space until the end of time.
Because of global warming, it was very hot as we moved furniture and belonging and, eventually, my mother to her new apartment.
I had recently started a succulent collection for my mother, knowing that she could take them with her.
But the potted annuals would not make the move. Their life was coming to an end.
Nor would the black-eyed Susans make the move. I wondered what would happen to them when someone new moves into my mother’s old apartment.
A few flowers were still basking in the sun.
After a few days, the apartment was empty.
Outside, the garden waited for the fall.
