Jessica Gazzola

It’s the time when the tendrils of the day are reeled in, when little bodies look for warm holes in which to burrow, and the sound of quiet replaces the din of chatter.  That’s how I used to imagine bedtime with children.  And sometimes, on a rare sleepy night, we come close.  But often, especially from my energetic son, there’s one last thrashing of tendrils, one more blast sending blankets flying, and a final gush of questions of dire importance (“How do flying squirrels fly?”… that sort of thing).

The ritual started as a ploy.  How do I get them to lay still and be quiet long enough to let sleep seep in?  My husband took a baby massage class and had a bottle of oil on the changing table.  Massage… a perfect last touch of love from mom to send them off to sleep!

And it works.  They request their feet, their back, their belly, and their sinuses (or her “mucuses” as my daughter calls them).  Their speech slows and slurs like little drunks.  Their eyes get heavy and blinking slows.  It evokes the feelings I hoped it would in them.   What I wasn’t prepared for were the emotions it evokes in me; memories that come to me in a tangled web of feelings and images.

I’m a girl lying on my belly in our living room next to my younger sister.  The TV is on and my mother sits cross-legged at our feet.  It’s a treat heralded with, “Who wants to do feet?!”  We would gather our supplies – towel, lotion, and pumice stone.  My mom would complain she had four feet to do, while my sister and I each took only one of hers.  But we thought it fair, her feet the size of our little forearms and slightly gnarled from never sitting.

I run my thumb down my son’s foot and my mom is lying in her hospice bed.  In her last days my dad and her sister make her comfortable.  They bring in a masseuse.  They caress her forehead.  When I arrive at the house where she will pass away I carry my first-born, only one week old.  My aunt tries to communicate what I’ve missed while becoming a mother.  “One day we were rubbing her feet and she let out a deep sigh.  Her eyes were closed and she was relishing it.  Then she said, ‘I could just die,’ and she opened one eye and gave us a little smirk.”

I mark my daughter’s head with oil like I did on the day of her baptism.  She is still there, on the threshold between worlds.  A priest for a couple years, I hadn’t yet performed Last Rites.  Without a book, with oil from the kitchen, I mark my mother’s hands and head and invite the rest of the family to follow.  I feel like a puppet and I want so desperately to break the strings and crawl into bed with her, but I’ve always been too controlled by obligation.

My hand on a smooth back, feeling the heartbeat slow, I have a premonition of nights when the world will weigh heavy on those slight shoulders; dreams good and bad will rouse them from their peace; another hand will follow the length of their spine; and one day, someone, probably not me, will bid them farewell.  Where do these death thoughts come from?  Why does love hollow us out so deep?  When a final day comes, I hope the path to sleep is paved with oil and sweet touch.