The risk of blogging: the personal blocks the practical and authenticity requires that you share in order to move past the block. This is going to be a tough one, but necessary for me.
Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while know that I make an annual trip home to visit my parents in the New Mexico desert. Each year I end up blogging here about how I felt and what I learned.
2015: In the Wilderness
2016: Stars in the Desert
2017: On Age and Time
2018: The Big Empty
2019: The Routines that Get Us Through
2019: Knowing the Future
There was a planned visit in 2020 that, for obvious reasons, never happened. And there was a visit in the summer of 2021 that I didn’t blog about.
That was the visit that my mother got her terminal cancer diagnosis. It was obviously very challenging, but moreover it was extremely personal. Not necessarily private (though yes, that too) but just too close to my heart for me to compost into some kind of understanding that I could share. It was also really difficult. Tender moments, yes, but also wounding and traumatic. I wish it wasn’t.
Families are created out of nested and chained and interlocking collections. They are (to quote Gordon and Austin at As Above and many times since) rhizomatic — sprouts from the same root network. For example, I have my little family back in the Pacific Northwest (my husband, my son). We are rooted together. There’s also my family in New Mexico and we too, share roots.
When I was here last summer I didn’t realize that would be the last time the collection of sprouts most directly connected to my parents would be together as a rhizome. I will cherish that memory.
I returned to New Mexico in February and talked about it, obliquely, here: Wound Care. This was less an exploration of themes and more a PSA.
My mother’s health began rapidly deteriorating. My mother, the taproot of this particular rhizome. Being the taproot is a difficult and demanding job. Everything good I have, I have from her (and some challenging things too, as with the complexity of human nature, but mostly good).
There was a morning just before I had to leave, just a few short weeks ago, where my mother and I were alone together and, miracle in the desert, it snowed. A fluffy, early spring snow. Her look of amazement and wonder when I open the blinds and showed her is another memory I will treasure.
When root bunches are separated as when you divide a plant into several clusters (or when I move across the country with my own family) connection can be maintained through the mycelium. Mycelia are more fragile than roots, more ethereal, but they are everywhere. I find that both sad (so easily broken) and uplifting.
The mycelium carries messages at the root and allows communication across boundaries. It shares its fruit as a lesson in connection and communication. The common chanterelle carries within it the whispers of the whole forest (does the wood ear listen to the trees?). There are other fruits that allow you to communicate even further afield. Some bring healing, others death… But the mycelium transcends death.
We’re all part of networks and families. My colleagues at work, my close friends, my Souper friends – both local and distributed, the hospice nurses and care staff who watched over my mom when I couldn’t. And my overlapping families. We don’t always get to choose all our networks of course. Some are of birth and circumstance, some highly cultivated. But we are all connected.
The interactivity of roots and the mycelium is called Mycorrhiza. This is a symbiosis where: “The plants provide the fungi with sugars (produced through photosynthesis) while the fungi get nutrients and water from the soil and pass them on to the plants. Mycorrhiza fungi can also protect the plants from pathogens which can cause disease. The mycelium, the network of fungal threads or hyphae, can cover and enormous area and so increase the range of the partner plant.” (Artis Mycropia)
We feed the network and it nourishes us. The network protects us. It increases our range so we can reach further. For weeks I’d been calling on my ancestors, and speaking especially with my maternal grandmother, asking her to help my mother when the time came.
My mother died on March 31st in the morning. My flight arrived the next day. I wish I was there, but I couldn’t be there. It’s all broken roots and missed connections. I did the best I could, but it wasn’t — and couldn’t be — enough.
But the mycelium transcends death. I told her what I needed to tell her before I left when she could still understand me. I hope to continue the conversation as her understanding is renewed, using the network that runs both under the skin of the world, and under our own skins. The network that touches our roots.
My mother died peacefully in her sleep, at home, beside her husband of 65 years. She was 90 years, 8 months old. She was a good mother and a good person and I loved her very much.
