This morning when I arrived in Orlando, an old friend picked me up at the airport and our conversation veered between our parents' health problems and our children's life choices. We're accustomed to acting as daughters and mothers so it's disorienting to be called on to mother our mothers.
When I entered my mother's hospital room, I got an inside look at her beating heart. It didn't look much like a heart to me, but the cardiology dude running the portable ultrasound machine assured me that the black-and-white blurry swirl of lub-dub, lub-dub was indeed my mother's heart. Beating.
Who can explain the mystery of a mother's heart? During our visit she often seemed quite lucid, expressing pride in her children and grandchildren and reminding my dad to take his potassium supplements, wrap a gift for a friend from church, and put some bills in the mail. But then suddenly she would swerve into an alternate universe. "I dreamed that they buried me," she said. "Don't let them bury me."
We won't, I promise, as long as that strong mother's heart keeps beating.
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