Fri. Mar. 24, 2023

Viole Fern

Rebecca Hennessy

My mom, Viola Fern, is recovering from surgery. At 93 she is beautiful and strong and old. Of course, she is dying. And she is managing the work of recovery as well as she has managed everything all her life; with love, humor, spunk, and more stubbornness and determination than the first day of spring, or tides, or mountain daisies.

She simply knows how to be Viola Fern.

She is precious. She is extravagant.

Viola Fern is a miracle.

I have been thinking about the stories my mom has told all her life. Told to me, to us kids, to herself. Stories that her stories return to. Stories she has learned to follow through the good and bad days and years of her life.

Mom's navigating stories are only partly true. Of course. Stories are small things that somehow know how to expand to hold the bigness we imagine for them, and for ourselves.

My mom has always believed that her heart is small, misshapen at birth, and too soft for the duties of the centering organ, the faithful pump. She has lived her gorgeously long 93-year life believing that her story was true. But doctors and nurses can't find evidence of this story. When they busy themselves with the wonder of her body, when they marvel at her capacity to live, when the shape of her heart appears on screens or sound beats in their ears, no one can see or hear smallness. There is nothing small about Viola Fern’s heart.

Mom's story isn't true.

But if her story helps her to recover and to navigate her way home, I will believe it with her. I will think of my heart as she does hers — too impossibly small to have powered the beautiful and courageous life with a love that brings everything to bursting.