My Mother's Feet

    When I was little I would see my parents' bare feet on occasion. I would see my mother's exposed feet more than my dad's. Why? I think that he wore his socks more, while my mom had this habit of sitting on a recliner or couch and either "picking" at her calloused skin, mostly located on her back heals, or clipping her toenails, or maybe filing them, or all of the above. She would sit in her night gown, with naked legs. I distinctly remember her one time showing me the hard cornered edges of her pinky toes. I asked her "why are they pointed (unnaturally) like that?" She responded, "Forty years of wearing shoes."

    Was that it, her precise words? Verbatim quotes grow blurrier with time. Or perhaps her answer was pithier, like "Forty years of working in tight shoes." Either way, the point was made. Or points! I think she elaborated on wearing shoes as a nurse, which she had done a bit as a young woman, and less in that field when older, raising us kids and moving on to other career jobs. But, there was the proof of her footwear in her scrunched-up toes. She had a bad habit of picking at her callouses on her feet, which would be gross to most people, but that was just my mom. Diet Coke with ice or a Tab poured into a tall glass, of which I would steal at least a sip, at the side table of the living room recliner, and her working her working class feet.

    Further Distance

   

     My mom moved out of the house the summer after my sixth-grade year. It made sense to most people in my home, including her, I think. It was what it was. My parents broke up. So, for us it was a long, hot summer. She made a visit to the local hospital at one point, she stayed there a bit. I cannot recall how long it lasted. I visited her there one time with my sister; it was hard. Things were hard that summer; I think that I tried to deal with it in different ways. Maybe that was the summer I became more involved with following sports? A healthier distraction from the real world, perhaps. Who knows?

    I would visit with my mom twice a week after she got her own place by herself, beginning Tuesdays and Sundays. Later we switched it to Thursdays and the Sabbath. I did this in seventh grade, up through the last week before I left on my mission at age 19. For six years. I maintained a close relationship to my mom even though I did not sleep over at her apartments or house. We stayed close, and on my mission to far off South America, she would write me weekly. Back then before there were emails, or any Skype screens or texts. Old fashioned letters. For two years she sent the steady handwritten missives of love and commitment, to her "# 1 Son" as she affectionately referred to me. I was her only boy. Maybe in that time she learned the ways of reflexology, or foot massage as therapy. 

    My mom's gift of foot massage as far as timing in my life is hazy to me now. Perhaps she would give me a wonderful foot massage after returning from my two-year service, after I wore out a few pairs of shoes in Chile as a young man. I spent a year back home in Bloomington, then I moved away for five years, sometimes not talking much to my mom on the phone, but we kept in contact, always. I would visit on the Christmas holidays. I think I would receive an amazing foot massage when coming home in the cold winter, perhaps once a year.

    I found myself back in Indiana once more in my late twenties, chagrined by failed relationships and not finding the right woman, the right partner. Or succeeding in a career, for that matter. My mother was a source of closeness and spiritual and physical tenderness; she would recommend certain young ladies to date. She was my cheer leader and advocate. I would spend dinners and evenings with her and her sweet husband weekly. She and my stepdad and I had good laughs and good times, they both becoming deeper close friends as I approached my thirties. We were adult friends and close buddies. 

    Gratefully I found my bride and soul mate (right?) when moving away from the Mid-West for the third time. I met her in Southern California, the state and region where my own parents originally met. We would come back to visit Indiana, each year with an ever-growing family, kids in tow. Did my mother give me foot massages when I was married? Maybe. The times now all blend together, the decades and recollecions have amassed.

    It was while I was away from everyone in the conflict of Afghanistan, having turned forty-two, when I found out that my mom was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in her life. When she had it when I was ten years-old she dealt with radiation therapy and came out of it pretty well. Thirty years later the liver disease was not meant to be recovered from as nicely, despite an organized chemical treatment which amounted to months of no avail in defeating the disease. I spoke with my mother frequently on Skype in those months, which was a huge blessing for me, being on the other side of the planet. 

    She handled the terminal sentence with grace and good spirits. We were grateful to see each other and talk as we could via screens across the continents, and by phone upon returning home. She passed in early March of 2014, at age 73.

    The Last Week, the Last Day, The Last Farewell

    The Thursday night before she passed she called me on the phone, and there was a definite sign in her voice of her body taking a turn for the worse. She became emotional as she explained that she would miss her grandchildren. I drove to Indiana that weekend, and arrived to see her in a bad state of mind and physical condition. Her body and brain were failing her. She could not act or think straight. She was not herself, really a shell of her normal bubbly personality.

    She died at the hospice on a Tuesday late afternoon. I was dropping off her older brother and sister at the house when I got the call from her husband of 28 years. I arrived at the bedside a few minutes later. I gave her a kiss on the cheek, and I felt emotions of our shared lives well up and flow.

    I thought of her feet. Her body still had life warmth in it. I moved to the foot of the death bed, and lifted the covers, and held her feet in my hands, hugging them and wept.

    I think I dropped some of my tears on her toes, the ones so well worn and cramped over the years. Her bare feet were the last real contact I made with her. 

    Later my sister and wife were able to dress her body in her final clothes for the funeral and burial. Her last garments to carry her before the resurrection. They probably placed socks and shoes on her feet.

    My embrace of my mother's feet symbolize what I care for about her. The vehicles that made her as a spry youth, that made her a nurse, a young mother, a growing and then mature mother, wife, friend, servant to others.

    Mysteries Abound

    There are a lot of mysteries surrounding the human psyche, the human spirit, the human soul, the human animal. These enigmas and puzzles can relate to me, or relate to supernal human (and Godly) figures like Jesus of Nazareth. There is conjecture, debate, and beliefs if He ever married as a mortal, or even could have had children. I am not sure, but I do not believe that any of those things would constrain Him as Who He claims to be.

    We do know quite conclusively that Christ had a special and close relationship to His mother, of whom it is recorded in the New Testament and Quran, to name at least two authoritative sources. He very much loved her, and she most certainly loved Him: as a baby, a child, a grown man. Even as a God. Many of us have this belief and relationship with our Divine Master. But there can only be one birth mother.

    Me, I have married and made myself, or been made, into a person that I am today. I am a product of the person that my mother and father, and derivatively others over time have made me. My mom and I had a special relationship: spiritually, cosmically, emotionally, physically. 

    I was her buddy on at least one occasion traveling up to Indianapolis for her radiation treatment when I was 10 and she was forty. She made it past that hurdle, but in life we know that most tangible things will not last. Human life is precious, is transitive, is at times too ephemeral.

    But I knew as I hugged my mom's feet that cold and snowy Tuesday afternoon, the sun fittingly setting on the west side of town, the city of my birth, for a new night of change and transformation and life altering conditions, I knew that touching and weeping over her last warm tissues, for me, was a way to welcome her transition, say a fond and heartfelt farewell, and give a kiss to the future and welcome feet of my Lord and God Himself, the Anointed One of Israel. The mother of all my earthly living that I knew who brought me into this great, big, beautiful and terrific, ever-expanding world and its surrounding universe. Behold, thy mother! Jesus said in his tremendous waning moments on this mortal plain. It was an exclamation, charge, and commandment.

    Would we all have such a deep and loving connection and relationship to our earthly and heavenly mothers. I am blessed for having had this, a bond that does not ever end. It goes on in perpetuity. As the favorite hymn of my mother proclaims, "there is no end to love."

The last verse of "If You Could Hie to Kolob", that we sang at her Saturday funeral says:

There is no end to glory;

There is no end to love;

There is no end to being;

There is no death above.

There is no end to glory;

There is no end to love;

There is no end to being;

There is no death above.

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    Long live my mom, long live her calloused and now eternally guarded feet.

7 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!

    Isaiah 52:7. King James Version