Fourteen weeks after the stroke she comes home, walking with a hemi-cane and an ankle brace, her lifeless left arm in a sling.
Winter is on its way out, leaving an oozy, muddy, rutted-up earth. We sit at the kitchen table, in front of the window. I am in the same chair where she sat on that night almost five months earlier. Framed by the squares of the window pane, the birds outside visit the feeder.
“Dad said I should make sure you know that when I cry, it’s not because I’m sad. It’s because I’m happy,” she says.
I stop chewing for a moment. I look at the bird feeder to see my first Robin of the season.
“You know that, don’t you?” she adds.
It seems like a good place to start. I’ve stopped measuring the future in terms of the past, waiting for myself—and my mother—to re-emerge the same as we had been, as if we’d just returned from vacation or woken up from a dream. We have only just begun to re-define ourselves and our family, one moment at a time. I’ve said goodbye to the familiarity of the past, and accepted the uncertainty of the future.
She starts reading her daily devotions, using a pink index card to help her follow the line. Her hair has grown in around her incision. I glance at her gratitude journal, lying open on the table.
“Our homes are our sanctuary from the world,” she has written. “Our lives are made up of all the little traditions and experiences we share with people. Cherish every moment.”
“Did I sign up for this?” Dad jokes, as he helps her walk to the bathroom. “I’m not sure this was in the contract. It must have been in the fine print.”
“You better make sure you have it in the fine print,” she laughs, turning to look at me.
And I think to myself that we are all in each other’s fine print, neatly inscribed onto lines containing our greatest liabilities. With every patient comes a family, sustained by their community and their faith in the medical professionals to whom they entrust the most precious pieces of their fine print. This is the year I am getting married, and all around me, I see love in fine print.
