Angels in the back yard

They are there

“I like it when she’s looking at us.”

My mom had been sleeping about 20 hours per day. Her body, still ravaged from chemo, radiation, and hip surgery, is working to repair itself. She’s often foggy and forgetting conversations and things. Then suddenly she’s lucid. Lucid Mom is sharp as a tack. Lucid mom is a figure-outer, the sharpest figure-outer in the family.

“Now, then,” she would say–and often–and then proceed to explain whatever she had discovered that we all needed to know. I haven’t heard her “Now, then,” in a while. I miss her “Now then’s.”

My mother has lung cancer. It was the day after she rang the bell for chemo, when we were all there to celebrate with her, when she was seeing more clearly the light at the end of the tunnel, with only twelve more radiation treatments until she could pause before the next phase of her treatment. The day after she rang the bell, she fell and broke her hip, which hurled her into hip surgery and nearly a month at a rehab facility, followed by continued home visits from the PT, OT, and skilled nurses. All while finally completing radiation and dealing with a heinous, chronic cough.

One day it was time to water her plants. Mom is infamous for her green thumb—she was the president of her garden clubs, the winner of numerous flower arrangement contests, and an aficionado of countless days spent in her exterior and interior gardens. Caring for her plants is ingrained in her, it sooths her.

Since I do not have a green thumb, she shuffled along beside me and in her soft voice, she guided me through her routine—six drops of plant food in water, then administered with care, using a turkey baster to give just the right amount of water and nutrients to each plant.

It was almost a “Now, then.”

I put the supplies away and noticed her leaning on her walker, staring into the back yard. She had a faraway look in her eyes as she stood there for several minutes.

“Cindy,” she called without altering her gaze.

“Yes, Mom.” I came up beside her.

“Do you see that square stone?” She pointed at the stone in question, deep in the back of the yard beneath a tree.

“Yes, I see it.”

“Do you see the angel tipped over behind it?”

For a split second I wondered what kind of angel she was “seeing.” Then I saw a small, winged garden stone angel lying on her side.

“She fell,” Mom said.

“She did,” I responded. “A fallen angel.”

“Will you sit her back on her stone?” she asked.

She watched me intently as I picked up the angel, wiped moist dirt from her face and wings and perched her back in place on her perch. I looked at Mom as she nodded.

“I like it when she looks at us,” she said with a wide smile that took over her entire face.

She had never looked more beautiful, my mother. Pure love.

I found it comforting too, as we both gazed at the angel in the back yard.