A Pig Tale, by Lea Haravon Collins
I slept with a pig last night.
I was hoping that, aided by the intimacy of sleep, Piggy would tell me what my mom could not.
Piggy is soft, nubbly, the size of a hand. Filled with bean bag pellets, he conforms to the shape of his surroundings and is very easy to place in a seated position. His pink fur is faded, having been washed accidentally several times, when he was transported, in unwillingly conspiratorial bed linens, to the nursing home’s laundry room. He has a curly tail and small black eyes of beads, although his eyes are more peaceful than “beady.”
My mom held Piggy for the first time when she rescued him, dirty and abandoned, at the side of the road by our old house, after my father died. She left him under a tree for a few days, in case his previous owner might want him back.
“I have adopted him,” she declared a few days later, her wry and whimsical humor, soon to be lost to dementia, still in her possession.
When she moved to live closer to me, Piggy was also in her possession. That was eleven years ago.
My mother, Alda, saved Piggy. In return, Piggy comforted my mother with familiarity, when no one else could. The recipient of countless kisses, Piggy was a constant friend to the sweet lady with “cognitive diminishment,” the 91-year-old mother and wife and sister and Holocaust survivor and artist.
Piggy was spoken to in the five languages that Alda knew fluently, each tongue chosen according to her mood or circumstance. For anger and food: Romanian. For everyday parlance: French. For conveying information: English. For distant memories: German. And, when hearing it from someone else first, Spanish. Piggy heard them all, sitting on the table as I fed them both, lying next to Alda during her increasingly long nap times, and sleeping with her, the night spent in an embrace.
When it got harder for my mother to express herself, I asked how Piggy was.
“He’s tired,” she would say, resting Piggy on her chest.
I called the aides to help lie them both down.
I slept with them, on their last night together. My hand on my mom’s heart, curled uncomfortably over her, the bulk and groan of an oxygen tank by my head, I listened to her breathe. My mom held Piggy for the last time, her other hand resting in mine, no longer able to caress and squeeze. Piggy’s black eyes watched the scene, watched over my mother, watched me, knowing that I would take him to his next home even as my mother went to hers.
Piggy and I are on the earth together now. Alda is under it. I knew how to connect with Mom, even in her dementia, but I don’t know how to befriend Piggy. We share a love for someone who is no longer here, but nothing else. He sits on my nightstand like a polite guest, neither of us knowing what to say, as if at a long, awkward funeral.
I reach for Piggy again and hold him, making another rescue.
