Kim Addonizio: The Moment

The way my mother bent to her car door, fumbling the keys,
taking forever it seemed
to find the right one, line it up with the lock and feebly push it in
and turn,
the way she opened the door so slowly, bending a bit more, easing
herself finally into the leather seat - She'd hurt her ribs, she
explained, but it wasn't injury
that I saw, not the temporary setback that's followed by healing,
the body's tenacious renewal;
I saw for the first time old age, decline, the inevitable easing
toward death. Once in the car, though,
settled behind the wheel, backing out and heading for the steady
traffic on the highway,
she was herself again, my mother as I'd always known her: getting
older, to be sure,
in her seventies now, but still vital, still the athlete she'd been all
her life; jogging, golf,
tennis especially - the sport she'd excelled at, racking up
championships - they were as natural
to her as breath. All my life she'd been the definition of grace, of a
serenely unshakable confidence
in the body; impossible ever to imagine her helpless, frail, confined
to walker or wheelchair.
She was humming now as she drove, that momentary fumbling
erased, no trace of it.
No acknowledgment of pain, of the ache she must be feeling
in her side. My mother
refused all that, she would go on refusing it. She peered ahead at
the busy road, the past all but forgotten -
somewhere behind us griefs, losses, terrible knowledge, but ahead
of us a day we'd spend together,
we were going there now, while there was still time, non of it was
going to be wasted.