Hello from the Edges of Life.

Did you hear? Mortality has been playing castanets wondering how I’ll dance on this sticky dancefloor. Will it be a slow dance to Stairway to Heaven or will the principal flip on the fluorescent lights and tell us the fun is over, go home now, kiddos. Wipe that smeared mascara and wash your bare feet. Don’t worry about that glass slipper, Cinderella. See you on Monday.  

It’s been surreal around here again.                

My jasmine has exploded over the fence. My biggest Love roses are dropping dozens of petals around me on my desk. No matter how busy I get, life keeps life-ing. When my hands are lifted to dance, and the gift of Source flows through me, nine years after they first danced on Mother’s Day weekend, there remains as equal an ease in seeing the truth of your divine perfection as there is to delight in a flower blooming in spring’s ecstasy or dropping her petals in messy pink evolution. 

Many here acknowledge the immortality of the soul. Others also wish to reclaim “being supernatural,” boundlessly exploring what’s beyond this intricate flesh. Have you been washed in the thrill-bumps of cosmic connections? Not yet? Then maybe instead, you have bitten your tongue so hard the taste of the iron of the stars whispered to you through your blood, “You are more than this. Remember?” Yes, even in Mercury Retrograde, the Universe is chatty. Are you listening?

These aren’t just musings of the greener grass on the other side but encouragement to truly live. These spotty hands want you to explore every texture of life’s fabric and then choose well. If we inexplicably find ourselves in a bumper car kind of default, bashing or being bashed by contrasting forces, maybe we are due for spiritual chiropractic. Or maybe we choose not to get on that ride next time. How do we find our alignment?  What or who is our North Star? How can we more mindfully set a course? Maybe next, we hoist our sails to gather what winds may come and apply experience, science, and magical alms to our most sacred forces to tack into the happiest, healthiest seas.

You may know I’m also on an adventure with my 95-year-old mother. I’ve had to step up to focus more fully on her care in and now, blessedly, out of the hospital. I can’t imagine how Mom could be here without the Sibbett siblings and spouses. It’s a full-time job to advocate for Mom’s well-being, manage her medication and moods under the sway of ER, doctors, nurses, therapists, and hospital stress sundowning, and make sure she is honored in every reasonable wish. This woman gave us life, championed every dream, and is our fiercest protector, even as she drilled us hard as children in manners, obedience, and vision of the happiest future. Her mothering wasn’t perfect. Whose is? It certainly improved by the time she got to me, baby 5, but the template has been clear: Family first. I don’t always get it right, either. But we are still trying hard to improve on the model. All of us.

Years ago, Mom gave my siblings and me the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. It’s not a sexy thriller. Nor is its simple cover even remotely romantic. Written by a practicing surgeon about medicine and what matters in the end, this wasn’t the book I wanted to read as I danced new beginnings. I’ve maintained that no matter how hard we try, no one gets out of this life alive. And though my eldest brother and wife loved Being Mortal and insisted we Sibbett siblings and our cousins read it, I just couldn’t when it was given to me. Between Source blurring out anything that wasn’t directly relevant to my learning the gift given me (and from the inside) to my time constraints, this book has been gathering dust in my overflowing shelves… until last week.

Mom’s palliative nurse called me to have a serious talk about hospice. As I wiped back tears, navigating the curves of yet another frantic drive to the hospital, I asked Siri to download Being Mortal in my Audible library so I could listen to it and prepare. This wasn’t relief. The first four chapters were important but infuriating. Modern society has handed over so many familial choices to a medical machine/system steeped in valuable science, but yes, commerce, too. Moreover, the training for caring for our aging populations has been devoid of practical practice like having hard conversations with harder choices, honesty and compassion, and familial understanding. I felt like Gretel searching for a shimmering stone in the dark night without a Hansel. But then, the book broke into something new for me.

If I wanted Mom’s nurses to care for my mother as profoundly as I did, they needed to understand her. When this sick, she was “not herself.” I asked Source to magnetize the right people to help. I also needed to show an understanding of how hard every doctor and nurse was working. I needed to help them by extending my mom’s gratitude even if she couldn’t express it. 

I asked how long Sergey, the green-eyed masked nurse with a thick accent, had been in the US, and I found out he’d brought his parents from Ukraine to be safe. He told me it was their tradition for offspring to live with their parents until they married. Now, I understood the seriousness of his vocation, commitment, and gifts. I thanked him again for being the angel of the day to care for Mom. My brother had covered for me in the isolation room with Mom, but I had been gone for more than 24 hours because I also caught her fever (short-lived. I had a wondrous speed-through of healing.) Now, feeling better and masked head to toe, once we re-established our fragility, we also saw strength in our humanity. A gentleness descended. Mom no longer cried out when he moved her pain-riddled body. Another patient had been screaming down the hall for many days in anguish, and Sergey and every other nurse did their best to soothe him, too. This was their work in and day out. I couldn’t imagine, but I had to try.

Mom’s pneumonia lifted just enough that the doctor said she’d sign the release papers. Instead of taking the ambulance to a rehab hospital with more strange food and noisy roommates, we elected to bring Mom back to her assisted care facility, where she would have 24/7 care with her favorite nurses. Here, even with hospice circling, we could more easily give her peace and quiet for a little gentle dancing if she wished. Someone I love told me it was risky. I agreed. She could get out of bed more easily, which meant she could also trip over her oxygen tubing and tanks if she forgot she’d just been released from the hospital. Instead of resting, she could also get up to brush her teeth or feed the critters, two things she loves. We are now in the whiskey and cookie phase. We had an aunt who only wanted whiskey and cookies for her last year of life. Well into her eighties, we agreed she deserved to do whatever she wanted, and we always brought her both. Mom, at 95, deserves this, too. Neither of us drinks whiskey, but milkshakes and cookies for Mom will suffice.

She was hardwired to be independent, practice self-care, and care for others (squirrels and birds are her friends just outside her sliding glass door), but Mom was still weak from the virus and all the time in bed in the hospital. She was sundowning and pulling her breathing tubes out of her nose, but still, we felt this was a better path no matter what direction Mom went. I am grateful to have the privacy to love and wrap Mom up in everything I can give her in her apartment.  Milkshakes and dancing hands. Cookies and flowers. Stories and movies and anything she wants. Every day is a “Yes Day.” It’s been good to be back in her facility; again, with her beloved nurses and the squirrels that come to her door for peanuts. We also wouldn’t be here without them (nurses and squirrels!)

Friday, after the angel chaplain of her facility offered a hand when seeing me comically trying to wheel Mom, her oxygen tank, and my laptop down the hall for a vital video appointment, we slid into two chairs in the backdoor hall for Mom’s doctor. The excitement put a flush in her cheeks. Dr. T appeared. She was a new woman without a mask as was the norm in her office. She smiled happy to see Mom. Looking over her charts carefully, reading the nurses’ reports from Mom’s facility and then back to Mom, Dr. T finally said, “Well, all I can say is this is a miracle! I can’t believe how you’ve turned around, Sis.” My eyes filled with tears. Last week, we were talking about hospice. This week, her vitals are solid. Dr. T said we are now going to wean her off the oxygen. Mom can return to exercise class with her Physical Therapist this coming week. “Keep up the good work!” Dr. T said before she bid Mom goodbye, for now. 

After Dr. T signed off, I think it began to dawn on Mom what she said. Everything was going to be okay—at least today. I closed my laptop, and Mom asked if we could walk around the yard and see the little stream and the new dogwood tree that was just blooming. “Yes!” I replied.

We looked at the barking dog. We sighed over the dogwood blossoms. We took pictures. She didn’t complain about the wind wrecking her hair. Her hair was already a hot mess of neglect, but she didn’t care. She could feel the wind. “But could we cut our hair tomorrow?” she asked.

“Yes!” I replied. I’d already made the appointment a few days ago.

Re-entering the building, I thought Mom might be tired, but as we came upon the game room, I asked if she wanted to go in. “Yes!” she said. “I don’t want to go home yet.” It was lunchtime and empty. And then, spying a long table with sawdust on it, I asked Mom if she was up to playing “this.” 

“I’m not sure what it is, but yes,” Mom narrowed her eyes, pushing her walker forward toward a table with numbers and markers. 

“I think it’s a kind of shuffleboard,” I said, “I’ve never played, but let’s figure it out together,” I said. 

My mother has always said she doesn’t like games and that she isn’t competitive. She had two older, athletic brothers, and every summer, she was raised with a lot of boys on their ranch. Mom always kept up. During the school year, she played center on her winning high school basketball team at just five feet tall because she was so springy. She also earned the nickname of dead-eye-dick because she was such a sure shot. Impressively, because she also had such courage and elegance diving from the 80’ tall Cottonwood trees into the Sacramento River, Mom was courted by the Olympic Federation to represent the US as a high diver, too, in the mid-1940s, but my grandmother said no, it wasn’t ladylike for her to compete. But to me and to tabletop shuffleboard, Mom said, “Yes.” She wasn’t going into hospice. She wanted to play.

It took a little time, but Mom soon was sliding the markers from her side of the table nine feet down to my side, where she had to make sure she didn’t slide the marker off the table but land instead on one of the three numbers. She won over and over. I may not have mentioned this, but according to Mom’s eye doctors, Mom is legally blind. She won without thinking or seeing with her eyes but feeling the marker make its way from her heart to my hands–not to win but to play with life, with markers of joy with her youngest daughter after weeks of not feeling like doing a thing. I don’t ever recall my mother playing anything with me in my entire life, but this game with her Friday was a slice of heaven on earth.

As she took a swig of Coca-Cola (a refreshing substitute in Mom’s world to milkshakes today), she looked up at me and wryly smiled, “Now that I can play shuffleboard, I’m ready for a cruise!”

Mom held for her laugh like a pro, and then, oh, how we giggled together. 

“Anywhere you want to go, Mom?” I asked.

“I’ll think about it,” she answered, closing her eyes.

Ah, the power of Yes Days in the Game of Being Mortal. Play on, friends.