She does not need me to come in.
She says this in the car with a particular brightness, a performance of capability that I recognize because I have performed it myself, many times, in many waiting rooms, the performance of a woman who is handling it, who has it under control, who does not need anyone to come in with her, who is fine.
I say: okay. I’ll wait.
And I wait in the car in the parking lot of the medical building and I think about the drive here, which was normal, which was the kind of drive you take with your mother without noticing you are taking it, and I think about the drives she took with me, to school and to piano and to the appointments I had when I was young and anxious and not yet able to drive myself, and I think about the fact that this is now the direction of things, that the car has turned around without anyone deciding to turn it around.
I am not afraid of this.
I want to say that clearly, because I think there is an expectation that this is the part where you fall apart, where the role reversal is a grief to be endured. And there is grief in it. I will not pretend there is not. There is something in watching your mother walk into a building alone and smaller than she used to be, something that is not grief exactly but is in the same neighbourhood, that lives on the same street.
But there is also something else.
There is the thing that feels like honour. The privilege of being the person who drives her. The fact that she called me and not someone else, that I am the one in the parking lot, that she trusts me with the ordinary logistics of her life now, the appointments and the prescriptions and the forms that need to be filled out and sometimes she needs me to speak up in the room with the doctor and sometimes she does not but either way I am the one she calls.
She is in there now. I am in the car.
The radio is off. I am watching the door. Not anxiously. With attention. With the particular focused quality of love that shows up when someone you love is somewhere you cannot follow and you are doing the only thing you can do, which is to be present in the parking lot, ready, when they come back out.
