Culture Crash

Crash. Crash. Crash.

Dozens -sometimes hundreds – of time a day, I crash into people. At work. Where I volunteer. With friends and family.

Yes. Even with friends and family. With people I know and like. How does it happen?

It’s bound to happen. Our cultures are different. Even my siblings, who have the same parents I have, have developed cultures very different from mine. We cover the socioeconomic spectrum, from working poor to upper middle class. We cover the educational spectrum, from GED to master’s degree. We work in the trades, in retail, in the classroom.

Growing up, we shared a common culture. Dad was a teacher and guidance counselor, Mom mostly a stay-at-home mom with part-time jobs here and there. It was a strictly Catholic home where education was valued.

As we developed our own friends and outside interests, these modified our natal culture. Now when we get together, we have common ground in that early culture. It’s something we still share. But we bring with us all those other cultures we’ve collided with.

“Culture” here means more than the Sicilian-German culture we inherited through our parents – which was clash enough it itself: the stoic, reserved German with the sometimes volatile Sicilian. “Culture” also means the way we see, think about, talk about ourselves and the world. That’s been shaped by education, work experience, spouses and significant others, friends. Different factors have shaped each of the seven of us, and sometimes they collide.

If this is true in one family, it’s no wonder there’s so much conflict in neighborhoods and nation. We see the world automatically from our own place in it – and everything that doesn’t look like us seems foreign.

But we can be more than mere tourists in other peoples’ worlds, gawking and pointing at that which seems “other.” Like sensitive guests in another’s country, we can look and listen before we open our mouths, let alone act. We can choose, however briefly, to immerse ourselves in the cultures around us.

As any sensitive traveler knows, it’s hard work to put aside your own language and a worldview that measures everything by “the way we do it.” But it can be done. It must be done.

Or…

Crash. Crash. Crash. Is that the way we want to live?

Losing Things

My mother has been losing things for years. I wasn’t around when it started, but I’ve seen what she’s lost over the past seven years.

She lost me, for one thing. If she knows who I am, she’s unable to say my name; she hasn’t said it for more years than I can count.

She’s lost most language. She used to speak word salad: words that made sense individually, but not the way she put them together. Now she says more letters than words.

She’s lost the ability to feed herself. Before she lost it completely, she was able to raise a roll to her mouth, so we asked that she have a roll at every meal so she could still feed herself a little. She still gets that roll. Now she can only eat it if we feed it to her.

For a long time after she couldn’t feed herself, my mother could still walk – with help. Then she didn’t walk anymore, but she could still stand. That meant she had some say in moving from toilet to wheelchair to bed. My mother doesn’t stand anymore. A Hoyer lift does the moving for her.

In the midst of all of this loss, my mother still holds on to at least two things: her eyes and her smile. When I look into my mother’s eyes, I still see something – someone – there. Her look isn’t vacant; it seems purposeful.

And my mother still smiles. Everyone involved in her care comments on my mother’s smile. One of her caregivers told me that her smile reminds him why he does this work.

My mother was an anxious woman. She worried about everything. She worried about germs. She worried about sins. It’s not that she didn’t smile, but she didn’t smile nearly as often as she does now. If she is awake, she smiles.

The protein plaques in my mother’s brain have stolen so many things from her, but one thing they’ve given in exchange is a ready smile.

I find it hard to visit my mother. Seeing her, seeing the people she lives with, makes me afraid for my own future. But I have to visit her.

She’s my mother. And she smiles.