Of Mothers and Redwoods

A Redwood tree doesn’t hit adolescence until it’s around 600 years old. I learned this stunning fact in the book I’m reading, “The Wild Trees.”

At 83, my mom is on the back side of life as a human, her adolescence nothing more than a faded memory. I visited her in the hospital yesterday, after she’d had surgery, and was taken aback by her wispiness. She looked like she was sinking into the hospital bed, her body a crumpled collection of achy parts.

In “The Wild Trees,” the author recounts a story of a handful of Redwood climbers who clamored up a 2,000-year-old titan, eventually nestling themselves in its nooks, 30 stories off the ground, to spend the night in it. In the middle of the night, they realized just how old this tree was, as it swayed in a gale wind. Trying to decide if they should descend in the darkness and rain, they eventually chose to wait it out, bargaining that this tree had lived through 2000 years of storms and it certainly would live through this one.

A few months later, one of the climbers discovered the shattered bones of the tree, collapsed on the forest floor.

I was visiting my mom just a few hours after her sinus surgery, which the surgeon described as “difficult but successful.” As I headed to the hospital, I knew not to expect the mom I usually see—classy, beautiful, put together. But that doesn’t mean I was prepared to see her so not put together.

It’s difficult to see my parent suffering, even if I know that it’s temporary. Stranger still, though, was seeing my mom as an old person. It’s a shocking realization, and it made me realize just how much I’d been fooling myself.

When the nurse came into the room to check her vital signs, she talked to my mom in a slow, even, slightly pitched voice—the kind of voice we reserve for little children and old people. I stayed by my mom’s side, holding her hands and not saying much. Repeatedly, my mom, in her post-surgery haziness, pinched open her tired eyes and mumbled how smooth and warm my hands were. She said how nice it was to hold her daughter’s hands.

I had to agree.