Dolly and the Divine

A year ago today, I grabbed coffee with my friend Andrea to say a sort of goodbye. I was moving from Abilene, where I’d been the past four years, to return home to San Antonio to take care of my parents. Mom had been diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer in May, and in September, she’d been given three to nine months to live. Dad has neurological issues that keep him from being able to do some things, and he needs a walker to get around. Andrea had recently lost her own her mother to cancer, and she wanted to not just wish me well but to offer some advice.

Sitting in an eclectic coffee shop we’d frequented as college students more than a decade earlier, our hands wrapped around our coffee mugs, we talked about how caring for a dying parent goes beyond the role of a caregiver. There’s a sacredness to it. It was a holy thing, she said, to join her sister in caring for their mother at the end, even when it was changing her soiled sheets and clothes. She would thank her mother – “Thank you for letting me serve you like this.” And back in Abilene, she wanted me to know that what was ahead of me was truly service.

I’d reconnected with Andrea in May 2015 when our group of college friends decided to have a girls’ weekend. Robyn bailed, rightfully, at the last minute to have a baby, and that day Malinda arrived to tell us she’d just learned she was pregnant with twins, one son and one daughter. Andrea already had two daughters. Angela and Courtney were married but without kids, although Courtney now has a daughter. The other married one was the other Sarah, who lived too far away to make it in (and she has a daughter now, too). I was the single one, living in San Antonio and not knowing I’d head back to Abilene for work that August. Andrea and I weren’t close in college, but once I relocated to West Central Texas – where she already was – we found ways to spend time together, mostly through community theatre.

She was struggling that weekend, in ways I didn’t know about until much later. But what I remember most was first, the rule from the rented home’s owners that we were not allowed to dance on the deck, a rule Malinda reminded us of multiple times as she was the one who had paid the deposit. Second, there was one of us forgetting how low her tolerance had gotten since college and getting way too drunk on white wine. Luckily the rental house had bleach. And third, I remember Andrea at one point dancing with fervor, in bold violation of the rule, on the deck while Angela watched and laughed. (Sorry, Malinda.)

Andrea was playing a Dolly Parton song for her, gesticulating wildly to get the point across that the song was powerful and wonderful – one worthy of dance. I watched from the sliding door, not wanting to interrupt the scene (unless to warn them if the deck started buckling or something). It was beautiful.

Ten months after our coffee date, my mother was in home hospice. Toward the end, she couldn’t stand up very easily on her own, until she couldn’t stand up or walk at all. And at those times, when my brother wasn’t in town to help, I’d have her put her arms around my neck and I’d lift her up, holding her to me. I’d say, “Let’s dance,” or “Time to sashay,” and we’d slowly move over to her wheelchair, or her hospital bed, or the portable toilet. Sometimes she’d be the one to say “Care to dance?” or count as if we were waltzing, her body only upright and moving because of my strength.

Lending her my body, and caring for her at her most vulnerable, from pulling her underwear up or down to changing her clothes or her ostomy bag, was a holy thing. I understood what Andrea meant, about being thankful to be a part of it. I am thankful I could show her an iota of the care she showed me for 36 years.

Several weeks after Mom died, Courtney texted me a screenshot of what was listening to and said the song was what was playing when she turned into the country cemetery east of Austin that rainy September morning for Mom’s funeral.

It was a sweet text to receive … and it got me thinking. Within a few minutes, I texted Andrea.

Andrea had driven down for the funeral as well. We didn’t say much to each other there; we didn’t have to. If you know what it’s like to watch a loved one die of a disease like cancer – and even more than that, to have cared for them as they died – then you know there’s nothing that can really be said. She understands the incalculable loss. She understands the cruelty of watching the woman who birthed you deteriorate in front of you, dropping pound after pound until her shoulder blades and spine stick out, losing hair from radiation that stays behind on pillows, and on the chair we set on the curb ahead of the city’s bulky pickup not long after the funeral. That chair was out there at night, by itself, making me think in a panic that it were as if I’d put Mom on the curb, her silver strands stuck to the fabric and shining in the moonlight, until I couldn’t stand it and brought it back in the garage.

But she also knows what it means to turn to songs like Dolly’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning (1976) – to turn to hope that we’ll feel like dancing with abandon again. Hope that maybe our moms are dancing to it somewhere now, silver hair flowing. Hope that maybe, someday, we’ll be OK.

It’s been a long dark night
And I've been a waitin’ for the morning
It's been a long hard fight
But I see a brand new day a dawning
I've been looking for the sunshine
You know I ain’t seen it in so long
But everything’s gonna work out just fine
And everything’s gonna be all right
That’s been all wrong

’Cause I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Oh, and everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay

It’s been a long long time
Since I’ve known the taste of freedom
And those clinging vines
That had me bound, well I don’t need ’em
Oh, I’ve been like a captured eagle, you know an eagle’s born to fly
Now that I have won my freedom, like an eagle I am eager for the sky

And I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Oh, and everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay

I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Ooh, everything’s gonna be all right
Everything’s gonna be all right
Everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay

And I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Ooh and everything’s gonna be all right
Everything’s gonna be all right
Everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay

I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Everything’s gonna be all right
Everything’s gonna be all right
Everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay