In My Mother's Illness, Her Tiny Bedroom Became A Source Of Healing, For Both Of Us

"You wanna know where I found that?" my mother asks with a Cheshire Cat grin. This can't be good.

"OK, fine, woman," I say, bracing myself while folding the oversize piece of Dupioni silk in question. "Where?"

"In the garbage!" she answers, her eyes lighting up like a carnival ride. Did I mention I was holding this trash tapestry in my arms, against my skin?

After some digging (and dry heaving), I discovered that my mother, Frances, had found the silk in the discarded bin at a local fabric store - not, as it turns out, in a dumpster. But still. I wouldn't be surprised. The day she helped me settle into my first grown apartment, my mother tried to convince me and my roommates that the slightly grungy couch cushions she'd found on 129th Street in Harlem where "just perfect" for our living room. "What? You guys need this stuff!"

So even when the tables had turned more than a dozen years later, and I was the one in charge of decorating her new space, I knew that somehow my mother's particular brand of hippie DIY style would seep into the room - and I wanted nothing else.

For nearly two months, she had been in a hospital in California, recovering from one illness and then another. On one of my visits from the East Coast, we had gone in together thinking she had a really persistent cold, and I left alone the next day with plans to stay - in her house nearby - indefinitely. It would be another 8 1/2 weeks before she'd leave the hospital, and I was determined to make her homecoming just that.

There's an honored history of women taking care of women in my family. The house my mother lived in had belonged to my grandmother, a lioness in little-old-lady clothes who died last December. My mother had moved from her real-life retirement fantasy in the U.S. Virgin Islands back to Los Angeles to help take care of "grandmommy" in her final two years. My mother had squeezed her 64 years of living - as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bogota, a Girl Scout camp director on Catalina, an LGBT activist in Atlanta - into the small back bedroom.

My mother's vibrant life had been swallowed up among the heavy, dark furniture, the ancient clutter and dingy walls.

"Let's paint it," I suggested after one of those bad days in the hospital. She needed an escape, a place to travel to in her mind that was far away from hideous beige blinds, flashing machines and drab floors. Her eyes lit up, and after I made several trips to Home Depot for more paint chips for her to choose from, my mother picked Ralph Lauren's Crescent Blue, a playful mint green that is soft in the sunlight and bold by the late afternoon. The three days it took to paint the walls were my own escape.

And, of course, we couldn't stop there. With a room the color of a beach dream, the mismatched mahogany-inspired furniture wouldn't do, and neither would the "Wizard of Oz" green sheer drapes or the matching bedding. Everything had to go.

I spent the next two weeks scouring HomeGoods, Target and Overstock for pieces that fit into my St. Croix-meets-South Central mental mood board. The goal was an island vibe without the cheesy sea-shell motifs, an endless summer in fewer than 300 square feet. I chose muted greens that reminded me of the sea after a Caribbean rain, natural browns that looked like palm trees and sheer white drapes that did body rolls with the wind. I placed forgotten photos in see-through frames like sea glass.

Most of the heavy lifting I did (literally) on my own. But eventually "your mom's room" became a rallying point for the rest of my family, who, like me, were all too happy to finally imagine the best and not the worst. Soon my aunts forgot their shock that I had moved a time-battered headboard out to the garage and thrown away a vase filled with dried flowers no one could remember what was for. All anyone wanted was for my mother to get to that room. If our collective energy was pointing toward her coming home, wouldn't she get there faster?

When that day finally came, I was 3,000 miles away, back in Washington tidying up loose ends in the life I'd left in a hurry. Over the phone, my mother told me with a trembling voice that she loved the room. But I could tell she was holding something back. Does she want more pillows? No, she hates pillows.

By the time I got back, Mom had already settled into her new room. She repeated how much she loved it, how "refreshing" the space was. But could she make one small, teeny tiny suggestion? That's when she dug out the silk fabric that I'd folded and put away weeks before, never giving it a second glance. Maybe we could use this as a sort of headboard?

Of course, the fabric was perfect. It was thick and striped with the exact mint green, cream and taupe I'd been using throughout the bedroom. It was also exactly the right size, fitting just so over her queen size bed after we stapled it to a discount stretched canvas from Michaels.

"That'll work," she said as she ran her hand across the silk, reminding me of the time I described my mother as the reverse side of an expensive piece of fabric. The side with the unruly and beautiful crisscrossing of seams. Perfectly imperfect and somehow always in place.

© 2016 The Washington Post

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