With “What’s Lighting Us Up” I’ve been inviting some of my writer friends to report on any books, music, movies, moments in nature, or life events that have been making them come more alive than usual. Here poet, essayist, and playwright Anne-Marie reflects on a difficult challenge in her life and discovers that there can be joy in even the toughest moments:

What lights me up these days? Contradictions. Being in paradox, touching enigmatic moments as though they were Braille, as though to decipher a mystery from the rough dots of hard experience. I hate it and I thrive on it.

In April my third memoir of a trilogy on rural life, Love, Sex and 4-H, was published. Since then, I haven’t been able to write much because my time has been divided between teaching, book promotion, and big concerns about my elderly mother. She’s 94, and last January, after four years in a home for the elderly, she fell and broke her leg. It did not heal well. She has not stood on her own, nor walked, since then. After a long and difficult decision-making process, our family moved her to a medical care facility—full scale nursing home. This is very hard; this lights me up.

What I am learning from her is not just what will happen to most of us in this new/old age, but the tender pain of how it happens. I watch her among her peers in the nursing home, and I ache for her, and I learn. In those efficient halls, with nurses bustling and busy aides in and out of an unquiet room, she is actually getting excellent care. She is getting stronger, little by little, though PT is her most dreaded part of the day. She won’t look at the therapist. She wants to go home. Home is the farm. I feel her longing like a knife; the blade bright with hope that I try not to dull without telling her outright lies. As I wheel her to get her hair done or watch her push-pull with her therapist, I feel her loss, but I see that she has gained muscle. She is interacting. She is eating. Her loss has some light around it. I can sometimes see to write by that light.

When I come home from being with her—usually two days a week—I try to honor our time together by writing down what she has said, what I saw her doing, how I came into her room to find her holding the corner of the bed quilt her mother (my grandmother) made for me, looking at the stitched name of her own mother and the date, 1973. I watch her fingers feeling the stitches; she is tracing her own mother’s name. She cannot always remember her grandkids, but she remembers her mother. She looks up and smiles, says, “Mama was here.” Then pauses, corrects, “Oh, I guess I dreamed about Mama.” I see her there, evening light falling on her shoulders, living in the past but not in the past. Because, of her, I am inside a moment and outside of time. I tell her I love her. I would not have this moment without her. I try to write those moments, to get one iota closer to meaning in a time that on the surface appears meaningless, unless we make it mean.

This week, after two months in the facility’s therapy room, the physical therapists helped her into a standing position. I’ve attached pictures of the sequence. Here is light. Their goal is to get her to stand just enough to, with assistance, help with her toileting. It’s a hard thing: no one wants to think about that, certainly not in a blog about light, but here it is. Toileting is a matrix—who knew? It’s not just about safety and hygiene. It’s integrity, mind-body connection, physical and psychological strength, interaction, and if she can help with it, it’s so much easier on the nurses. That singular and simple goal has light around it.

So I stay present but on high alert. And I file away. This is also contradiction. My mother seems to know. She’ll look up from her favorite snack, Lay’s potato chips, and as she scatters chipflecks on her shirt, she’ll tease, “You’re the one who says, remember this and remember that.” Crunch crunch. She loves salt. She tells me stories she has told no one else—though she has told others different things. How does she choose? She lets me see her cry sometimes; tells me how much she misses my dad. She has let go of her anger toward me for many (not all) the stupid things I have done. We have finally become friends. This is light.

Many friends, and not only those in my generation, are going through similar experiences—I haven’t found a family that isn’t touched by this elder care issue and its growing complications in this medically politicized world.  I’ve come to recognize in my peers a certain charged worry when parents come up, and after living with the complexities of care-taking, an acquiescent shrug, so this is how it is. I used to hate that, to think there must be some call to action. I understand better by having observed my mother’s slow acceptance of powerlessness, even as her children take unwilling power over her life. More contradiction.

We don’t have a lot of models for how this part of life is done because every single elder’s story is unique and relates differently to family. Contradictions though—like learning to be friends with your mother only as her calendar and clock disintegrate—that’s not unusual. In the end, we do what we can as best we can with what we have and hope we’ve done so out of the right motives. We walk in some kind of shadow. But as her needs become greater, she has offered me opportunity and slow as I am, I am seeing the light. There’s a process here about our love maturing, something I somehow missed before. I don’t understand this; I know it’s true. Most of us are learning to love our way through this. Contradiction becomes mystery. Wonder. Light.

(Anne-Marie Oomen is the author of three memoirs, Love, Sex, and 4H, Pulling Down the Barn, and House of Fields (all from Wayne State University Press); An American Map: Essays (Wayne State University Press); a full-length collection of poetry, Uncoded Woman (Milkweed Editions); and seven plays. She and her husband, David Early, have built their own home near Empire, Michigan. Visit her website here.)