My Mother's Toes

My mother had a number of physical habits that I suppose could be called tics, but they were more subtle and more endearing than that term implies. She was always in motion in some small way even when she was completely at rest. Her nose would twitch, not unlike a rabbit’s, whenever she sat at the dining room table drinking her coffee and reading. Her eyes would blink in rapid patterns while she was listening to someone on the telephone, and her toes would bob and sway while she sat back in the recliner watching TV. Those toes had a life of their own to the degree that my mother regularly had to replace her tennis shoes because her big toes would gradually burrow holes through the tops of them. Same thing with her slippers. I still have a pair of them—fuzzy navy blue ones with a hole poked through right above the big toe.

When we last took my mother to her oncologist in January 2002, he assured us that the agonizing regimen of radiation treatment she had just completed would start to take effect soon, and the tumors pushing their way through her bones, where there was no space for them, would finally start to shrink. It was no cure, of course, but it offered some hope that the grip of pain not even morphine could free her from would finally let up. And then we could talk about the finality we hadn’t had a chance to address yet and do our best to enjoy the remaining three to four months of life the oncologist predicted my mother had left.

What the oncologist did not know, what none of us knew, was that the cancer had metastasized to her brain, and in the middle hours of the very next night my mother suffered a massive stroke. She managed to tell my father and brother (who was visiting with his family) that she did not want to go to the hospital. By the time I arrived from my apartment, she could not voluntarily move or speak or even control her eyes, which rolled back in her head as I greeted her and kissed her cheek. Hospice care arrived a few hours later and had a hospital bed, oxygen tank, and morphine pump set up by midday. At this point, my other two siblings were already on planes, making their way across the country from their homes on the east coast.

I don’t remember quite when or how we first noticed it, but very early on we discovered that my mother could move her feet a little. Her left toes, in particular, seemed especially mobile. We began asking her simple yes and no questions, instructing her to move her toes for yes answers. I don’t think I can begin to describe the joy and excitement that filled our hearts when we saw her move her foot very deliberately in response to one question, hold it quite still at another, and then move it again to another. Behind her slack mouth and rolled back eyes, my mother was still with us. She was still aware. She was still able to communicate with us.

In the next few days, we frequently gathered around her bed and sang hymns. My mother loved music. Growing up, I often found her in the kitchen warbling along to a favorite song and even doing a kind of soft-shuffle dance, her eyes half closed. When she’d see that I’d caught her at it, she’d wink and smile at me and then get back to it. And now, as we circled her bed and sang, her foot danced along. We knew it was deliberate because the motion would still when we paused and start up once we began singing again. When I told her how much we loved her and that we knew she would tell us she loved us if she could, the motion of her foot nearly kicked the sheet off the bed. On the fourth day, her motions became a bit more irregular. By the end of the fifth day, her foot no longer moved, and at the very end of the sixth, she died.

When you gather at the side of someone who is dying, someone whom you deeply love, time has a way of stretching out and small things have a way of being magnified. There are so many elements of those last six days—both excruciating and exhilarating, humorously mundane and divinely sacred—that I hold in my heart and my memory and have yet to fully process. But on this Mother’s Day, I think about her dancing toes and thank God for the sweetness of that blessing, for that tiny miracle of motion that connected us beyond the power of speech.