Working in the front yard today, I discovered them almost by chance. I'd all but given up on ever seeing that little tree blossom again, but there they were. Small, fragrant blossoms.
My mom never really mastered the idea of nurturing her garden. It was especially challenging, living in the Mojave Desert. She saw her best successes with things that were allowed to grow wild and untamed like her Desert Willow and Palo Verde. She was especially proud of her occasional cactus blooms.
After my dad passed away, Mom moved into an apartment in the Central Valley where she shifted her gardening focus to tending a wild privet that had sprouted on her little patio. I tried to supplement her garden with things I thought could be contained and managed. A small tomato plant, a miniature rose, and, because she lived in the middle of miles and miles of citrus groves, I gifted her one year with a potted mandarin. By potted, I mean that I had bought her a nursery tree and a larger pot that I'd intended to plant it in, but she would never let me. She preferred it in the little confining pot that came from the nursery.
Over the next several years, whenever I would drive the 200 miles to visit my mother, I would first examine the mandarin on her front porch before I knocked on her door. I was at first amused and later alarmed at the struggles of this poor little tree. One year it spent most of it's time over-watered and sitting in a soggy puddle in it's pot. Another year, it was covered in little bugs that my mother insisted were citrus psyllid because she'd looked up citrus pests on the internet. I think they were aphids. I showed her that a blast of the hose would wash them away, and the tree made another recovery.
Then came the year of dryness. As I walked up to the door on one of my visits, I saw that the leaves were falling off, and the branches were dry and brittle. "You need to water your mandarin," I said as I walked in the door.
"I watered it yesterday," Mom said.
I argued with her and showed her the dryness of the soil and told her there was no way she could have watered it a day ago, but she insisted. It didn't make sense. Why would she lie? As this scene repeated itself a while later, I realized that it wasn't a lie. It was dementia. In her mind, in her reality, she did water the mandarin yesterday.
Through her early stages of dementia, she would also sometimes drag the mandarin into her house if she thought it was going to be too cold outside. My attempts at reasoning with her ... at trying to explain to her that the porch next to her house was protected from frost ... were beyond her ability to comprehend. I established a new routine during my visits. I would check the mandarin before I got to the door, but I never questioned or accused. I would quietly water that mandarin when I visited, and I knew that my sister was doing the same. And we worried.
Mom's dementia deteriorated her mind to the point that we had no choice but to "kidnap" my mother and move her in with us. The mandarin came with us. I wanted her to have enough of her familiar belongings here to help her settle in and feel at home. I finally potted that little tree into a larger pot and placed it outside the large window for her to be able to see it from her place at the dining table. Like my mother, the mandarin rebelled at the move. It dropped it's leaves and refused to bloom, despite my own more experienced gardening efforts. My backyard has six citrus trees that give us amble fruit, but the mandarin sat sulking and forlorn.
Mom lived with us for only a few months, and then she spent the next two years in memory care. She died on 17 Adar (or March 4 according to the Gregorian calendar). I told people she'd died of Parkinson's Disease. The hospice nurse argued that conclusion because the saying goes that people don't die "of" Parkinson's Disease. They die "with" Parkinson's disease. The nurse and I came to a compromise. We agreed that my mother died because she stopped living.
After the memorial service, I ran away from home. It had been hard seeing my mom decline. It was emotionally exhausting to see her go from stubborn and independent to only vaguely present ... and then to not even there. The end was mercifully brief. The decisions. Family. Friends. Rabbis. And then it was over, and I ran away from home for almost two weeks.
I returned and decided to spend some time working in the yard. Something I've had little time to do lately. And there was the mandarin, adorned in blossoms, offering a promise for the future.
Lita Reid
3 Sivan 5690 - 17 Adar 5778
aleha ha-shalom
