Legacy
A memory from nearly eight years ago...
When I was a young boy, my mother would take me by the hands and swing me around the room. She would say to me, “Let’s do a little dance.” We were horrible. We swayed more than danced, but whenever music came on in the room, there she was. She’d grab my hands and sway me to the sounds of the song.
When I was a teen, and many things had changed between us and the world, she’d still swing me round the room and say to me, “Let’s do a little dance”. The years passed by, I grew up. This little ritual was with us still. I moved away, started a family, and moved back home. We would still dance in the lounge room if any music came on and sway together. We would “sing” and chat and sway along together.
Years crept on, as they do. By the fates and chance, I was there to help my mother in her final struggles. Cancer had returned to her body after twenty-three years of being cancer-free. She went downhill rapidly. On the day that she was told that they could do nothing for her medically, she made a decision, somewhere deep in her own heart. “This is not ‘quality of life’”, she told me in a whispered, weary voice.
We took turns as a family to support my father in her care. I’d help her from the bed to her wheelchair, and as I did, she would shuffle around and mumble, “Do a little dance.”
I don’t think she was conscious of this connection to our past. In fact, I think Dad was the one who started calling it a dance. That doesn’t matter to me now.
What matters is that we kept dancing. Around the lounge-rooms and through the houses of our lives. From the wheelchair to the bed and back into the chair again.
As I sit and write, Mum has been gone from our dancefloor for seven months now. The dance was done.
But four months ago, I was standing in the kitchen, feeling down and flat and missing my awkward dance with my mother, when my beautiful ten-year-old daughter came into the kitchen. She took me by the hands and got me to swing her around the room in a dance to the music playing in the background.
I held her close and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “Let’s do a little dance.”
I told her the story of dancing with her grandmother.
And the dance continued.
Thank you for reading!!
The pic was created using Bing AI Image Generator (DALLE-3): https://www.bing.com/images/create/