Death and dying. Thoughts on my mother.

A Massage for My Mother

by Elizabeth Ranney

My frail, elderly, wheelchair-bound mother was 93 when she sang me this song in response to my question of what she thought about while she was getting her weekly massage.

"I haven't thought about that song for years and years," she told me.

In truth, she had never understood or allowed herself to experience her own sexuality. And her weekly full-body massage had stimulated thoughts and feelings which she had kept carefully buried for most of her 93 years.

It all began as part of my own process of facing and dealing with my mother's increasing frailty and confusion; her bent and boney body, her loss of weight, her failing memory. As I struggled with my own resistance to seeing my mother deteriorate in these ways, I pushed myself to touch her more. I gingerly tried first touching her protruding shoulder blades, then closed my eyes and massaged her back and shoulders.

By fully touching her aged body I hoped to overcome the repelling thoughts that kept trying to push me away. How could I genuinely be with my mother when I was so put off by the sight of her bones draped with her sagging flesh; by her drooling mouth? How could I hold her so thatshe would not feel rejected and abandoned? Was it my own fear of rejection I was battling?

My eyes closed, I slowly began to get the "feel" of her body. I came to love her bones, to hold her in ways I would come to realize she had never been able to hold me. In my mind's eye, I had a fantasy of a "holding room" with comfy couches where I could cradle my mother and hold her head to mine. Instead I bent myself into a pretzel leaning over her wheelchair or the "crib sides" of her bed in order to get close to her.

And, over time, as I massaged and rubbed her back, neck, shoulders, hands, head, I wondered if she would like someone to give her a real, full massage, all over her whole body. I wondered if I could perhaps arrange such a massage for her in the nursing home.

I asked her if she would like something like that. I wondered how she would respond, my Victorian mother who had told me that she didn't pick us up as children and cuddle us because she believed that such attentions would "spoil the child." How would she respond when the unspoken rule in my family was that you never let anyone get close, physically or emotionally?

Never mind. I had learned in my Gestalt work, painfully and first hand, that those needs, desires, yearnings lie buried deep inside all of us, inside our bodies, regardless of how we were raised or how old we are. My mother fooled me or else she validated my intuitive sense. She said she would like that.

So began the hunt for someone to provide a massage for my mother. When I asked the nursing home if they could help me with this plan, they said they had a physical therapist who could do this a couple of times a week. Fine, I thought. Right there on site, someone to arrange it. No problem. It was only after several months that I discovered that the physical therapist came for only 10 minutes and that whatever was done had no impact on my mother. She said no one ever came to massage her.

Clearly this was not what I had in mind. A friend gave me the name of Allegra, a massage therapist. I called her and asked her if she would be interested in going to a nursing home and massaging a frail 93-year-old woman. How did she feel about very old people and their frail bodies? She told me that she loved old people and that she would really like to do it.

I had, however, neglected to consider that nursing homes do not just allow unauthorized personnel to come and do things with and to patients, regardless of the fact that the family had made the arrangements. Allegra presented the necessary credentials. The doctor wrote the necessary orders and my mother finally began getting her massages.

In their weekly sessions over the next three years, the most amazing, wonderful and unpredictable things began to happen. A very close and intimate relationship developed between these two women. And out of this developing trust, my mother began to share what she was thinking as she allowed her body to be lovingly touched. She opened her mind to Allegra, sharing with her the fears and anxieties that had haunted her for decades. Allegra told me that for a year or more they talked of nothing but sex.

And during those months in my visits, my mother and I too talked about sex. Her naivete stunned me. At 93 she was like a prepubescent child.

She told me of her total ignorance of sexuality and of intercourse as the means for the conception of human life, until sometime after I, her second child ,was born. For her, intercourse was rape. In horror I realized that this was how my sister, my brother and I were conceived. I found myself angry at my mother. How dare she be so passive, so ignorant of something so fundamentally important about her body, her life, my life!

One night I drove the 50 miles home in a rage. Thoughts flooded through me of the many times when I was a child that my mother would pin me down to the bed and administer enemas until I could stand no more of the water pouring into my body. My mother did this to me for my health according to conventional wisdom of the day. For me it was a violation and abuse of my body. My mother says I never cried.

With a flash of illumination I understood how she could have abused my body so when I was small ... she had no love or understanding of her own. My harsh and distant father had always born the brunt of my anger. My mother was the "good" parent in my memory. She told me she felt she "protected us" from our father; that she was terrified of him. More and more I felt lopsided. I searched for ways to find some love for my father. And now I realized with a start that I also felt anger for my mother. I was filled with a new sense of balance.

"I feel much better about myself," my mother told me. She shared with me her lifelong fears and questions about sex, her loveless marriage. We talked about communication. We talked about the nature of love and what it meant to us, about our failed marriages. I too opened up to her, sharing with her some of my "secrets," about my lover; about my passionate self. I came to begin to know my mother and, in knowing her, to know my self.

My mother died two weeks ago. She was almost 96. My thoughts drift back to that last afternoon of her life ... She looks at me intently though she will not speak to me. I hold her hand in mine, the bones of her fingers. I run my fingers through her hair because for me that feels so good when I need comfort. I turn on some classical music, Vaughn Williams, 1 think it is. And I tell her whatever she wants to do, wherever she want to go is all right. My eyes close and I follow the sound of the music. I tell my mother to jump on the wings of the song and go wherever the music goes.

Her work is done. Her circle is closed.

I like to think I helped my mother die.

If you were touched by this article, we invite you to read "The Sanctity of the Heart" ("My college friend, Leslie, is dying of cancer. It is July 4th, and I have just flown into Los Angeles to spend a few days with her.") by Cherie Martin Franklin and "Eulogy for Martha" ("Through her words Martha clearly emerged as the person she was, a woman who lived from a deep and knowing place.") by Deana Murphy Graham and Don Murphy. Both articles are in Pilgrimage Vol. 26 and Vol. 27 and can be ordered from this website; please click on "How to Order."