In Velvet Shoes

 For weeks Lori’s friends have been at her bedside. Some read to her. Bits and pieces of short stories, poetry, Psalms, Celtic prayers,of course, one of her favorites: Jane Austen.

Her brain was assaulted a few months ago by one of those nasty crabby growths that reached in and plucked out her left lobe’s ability to say what she so wanted to say. Her word center has been deleted. Ironic, this turn of the screw, as her whole life has been one of word-reveling. Instead she’s reduced to “salad speech” originating somewhere deep within a morphine haze. She was a master English teacher and brought words to her students in ways many of them must still be reeling.

After her retirement, she joined a group of us in a reading circle—we read out loud to each other. We'd pass the book around and around as we luxuriated in being read to by a fire. Tea cups. Cookies. Candied ginger.  Lori attended most faithfully because she found solace in hearing “her” familiar words again.

So it was most natural that when she could no longer keep our reading dates, we would come to her. To read. To hold her hand. To be with her. To listen to her attempt to put words together again and watch, sadly, as her face filled with despair when, even to  her, her efforts made little sense. She often pointed to her head and mouthed “sorry, sorry, sorry.” Sorry for all those lost words. Sorry for her inability to communicate again. Sorry. Just plain sorry.

The other day, armed with several volumes of poetry, I showed up at her bedside. Although it was not easy for her to stay awake, you could tell she really tried. It was her favorite poetry, after all. The ones she taught. The ones she loved. Having been an English teacher once myself, I suspected they were some of the ones she, too, lived by.

After a couple of Shakespeare sonnets and those famous lines about what dreams are made on from The Tempest we skipped over the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” for obvious reasons. One day my body will lie with hers in an historic Vermont country churchyard. We'll share the quiet space with some Revolutionary war heroes. I went on to Blake. “Little lamb, who made thee?"  I could tell she loved it. So I read it over again. “Little lamb, I’ll tell thee.”

“The Daffodils.”  “My Heart Leaps Up.”  I skipped over “The World is Too Much With Us” because I suspected I wouldn’t get through it, knowing Lori’s world was slipping away.  And I paged past Coleridge as well, thinking she now had her own "opium images."  I paused briefly at Emily Bronte’s “Last Lines” if only because I knew Lori’s family was distantly connected to the Bronte home, now a museum with the British Historical Land Trust. But of course I could not have made it through those last lines of “Last Lines” even though they do hold some consolation: “There is not room for Death,/Nor atom that his might could render void:/Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,/And what Thou art may never be destroyed.”

Instead we two leaped right into the 19th century and clung to Emily Dickinson for a bit. “There is no Frigate Like a Book.” And of course “Hope” more for me perhaps than for her. Then I warned her it would be very silly, but here comes Lewis Carroll and “Jabberwocky.”  T’was so brillig. Her eyes widened at mention of the “slithy toves.”

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins. We “shook the foil” together. We felt, for a moment there in hospice-land, Hopkins’ barbarous beauty and were consoled by visions as “the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”  Then “Pied Beauty”--twice, for how can you absorb all those dappled things if you read it only once?

I dallied over Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” but decided it was too long and it might make her even sadder not to have her own dog with her, a jumpy poodle named Sally who would not have taken kindly to such a confined space.

On to the twentieth century. A couple of short ones by Robert Frost. Then, for some reason I turned to Elinor Wyle and her “Velvet Shoes.” A nurse came in to attend to something. When all was quiet once more, Lori distinctly said, “Start over.”

So, even though it was July, we walked in white snow and soundless space with footsteps quiet and slow at a tranquil pace under veils of white lace—together.  And I read it again. And once more. She closed her eyes. Perhaps she was thinking, somewhere in that vast space she now spends a great deal of time in, about the last time she visited our mountain. It was January and her boots made deep tracks through the deep snow because their car couldn’t make it all the way up our drive. I, too, was back there again, remembering her laughing, tramping, stamping.

I thought she was asleep and started to leave. She opened her eyes, said, “Thank you. That’s my saving.” That phrase will always stay with me. To think poetry was her saving. Or maybe it was the thought of velvet shoes.

Comments

[Genie]

Karen, thank you so much for writing about Lori here. It's the only way I can keep updated. Your words are soft and brilliant at the same time, just like Lori. Bless you both. It's a very hard time, but Lori will find a way to make it precious.

Genie