Book Covers

Lately an imperfect necklace of deaths hang on our doors. Passage of a wheelchair-bound mother of a friend after the slow immobilization of her muscles. Then, my mother's friend who resembled a sprite, skinny bird, wore only pastels and whose subtle Texas drawl made for the sound of an extra grandmother especially when she shared her interpretations of my teen daughter.  Finally, just three days ago, my husband's mother slept her way into her final rest, essentially alone in Philadelphia, "no longer engaged by America" my husband guessed. What is that like, the disengagement? the untangling from a life? 

My mother-in-law rarely seemed content unless she was reading a decent book or listening to a wise piece of music on the radio. She once typed us letters on the stationary my husband had printed for her and sent as a gift. Across the top of that cream colored paper, we had placed quotes from Shakespeare and Dickinson, one or two lines to stir the reader's sensibility. A gift doubled, once for the one who penned the letter and again for the recipient. 

Another friend lost her mother too some months ago. She described her mother's house, where with each visit, she witnessed the slow disappearance of whole swells of books, parallel to her mother's disappearance  into unconsciousness inside her pain. Her mother was a voracious reader and, as I understood it, her family - at the mother's insistence - had begun donating the books even before she passed on. My friend and I laughed softly at this image, though I can't remember which of us voiced it, of a Harry Potter-like library where books dematerialized, covers first then the insides - novels, philosophy, short stories, willed into the atmosphere to find a new home. New readers in a lending library with its high windows open to receive, or hands palming paper in hospice thrift shops where the books were originally found (all proceeds to wheelchair bound mothers in another state). Perfect, used paperbacks magically appearing on breakfast tables in the medical wing of a retirement home for grandmothers who lean out of their bodies and into their souls listening to the sounds on the radio. 

I turn and stare in awe at the wall of books in this study. I think how many I have carried in cardboard boxes across geography. How many I have kept, thinking I would share them with my daughter who, at this time in her life really isn't even much of a reader. But inside them there are folded sheets of notebook paper with pithy thoughts inscribed and, yes, the wilted algae colored leaves and dull pink flowers from a long ago season folded into the pages of so many of these tomes. There are the no longer relevant telephone numbers scribbled next to my name on the fly leaf and to look at them is to conjure former residences and all the jolly or contemplative friends with whom I drank, ate, slept and, well, read with in those times. No separating oneself from a life long lived, I think, as long as the words are still legible on the crisp paper in slowly disappearing ink. 

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title" -- Virginia Woolf