How poetry and birds brighten my 97-year-old mother’s nursing home room | Opinion

My mother, by all appearances, has little to treasure in life as she lies on her back, bedridden in a rural Georgia nursing home.

It’s a hard place, even to visit.

Someone is often moaning loudly down the hall.

Her roommate, raised to speak both English and Spanish in New York City, now has spirited conversations with imaginary people.

There is a clock and a calendar on the wall, but time does not seem to move in her room as she approaches her 97th birthday.

Mama does not want to be there, but my siblings and I feel blessed that she has a place with the constant care we could not offer.

My sister and my brother visit regularly; she has stayed for months and years at a time, and her son, my nephew Peter, checks on Mama several times a day.

Peter buys bird seed in 20-pound bags to keep wings of many colors fluttering right outside Mama’s window. And he brings flowers from the farm where Mama lived before going to the nursing home right before Hurricane Helene hit the area last year. Some were planted by her grandparents, who never imagined what purpose they would fulfill in 2025.

Mama can’t hear much, doesn’t want to eat anything, and has to constantly fidget with plastic prongs delivering oxygen into her nostrils. But her spirit remains uplifting.

She jokes that “sometimes I forget what I’m trying to remember.”

She also recites full poems, most of them memorized in the sixth grade — 85 years ago.

This past week, Mama, in a low, raspy voice, recited the touching poem “Little Boy Blue” by Eugene Field, about the death of a child. She recited a poem four times as long called “The House With Nobody In It” by Joyce Kilmer, from the 1936 book, “The Best Loved Poems of the American People.” And then she plucked an old rhyme from memory.

“A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard. Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?”

Maybe that thought was typical for Mama’s generation.

She has told me that, in her youth, adults didn’t want children “to think more highly of themselves than they ought to think.” They weren’t to be spoiled or overly proud.

“Don’t let anybody think they’ve got it made,” she said. “My mother never, ever told me how to spell a word. She’d say, ‘Spell it out’ or ‘Look it up.’ ”

Of the Greatest Generation, Mama, who remembers exactly what she did the day World War II ended, said: “Heaven knows what we could’ve done if anybody ever encouraged us.”

She also recalled this couplet that all the children recited at her grammar school graduation at the Samuel M. Inman school in Atlanta: “Let no one say, and say it to your shame, That all was beauty here, until you came.”

That bit of poetry graces a placard in a public park in New York City that spurred a wonderful story in The New Yorker by Abigail Deutsch, who tried unsuccessfully to track down its author.

The idea of finding poetry in a nursing home is something we should all cherish deep in our souls. Because if we can find the beauty, and enjoy the scenery, in a room that doesn’t change much, then we can write with our own lives graceful lines worth remembering.

I think of this as many of my friends have lost a spouse recently, sometimes unexpectedly, and always tragically. Sometimes, words fail me.

Just last week, columnist and editor Margaret Evans of Beaufort lost her husband and newspaper publisher, Jeff Evans. He died Sept. 6, days after falling at home.

Let’s give him the last word on how to look at these things, like a line of poetry in a nursing home or on a placard in a park.

Of the legacy he and his wife would leave, Jeff Evans told Kim Sullivan in an “Out and About” video in 2020: “I think I would appreciate our legacy being something like, when they were here, they did something good for the community. Period.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@gmail.com.