The Good Towels

This was written in August of 2005. Since then, it has been published in a couple of fine publications. My mother passed away on September 20, 2006. But I continue to live the lesson of The Good Towels. I hope you enjoy it and learn something, too.

A few days after my mother was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer, I found myself inside the hallway linen closet just outside her bedroom door. Although both she and my father had invited me to sleep in her bed while I was there and my mom was hospitalized, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in her bed.  My father, who is paralyzed, has his own room across the house from hers and they have slept apart for these last 15 years or so. I chose the “guest” bed instead, which really, until quite recently, had been where my 90-year-old grandmother had called home. But now Nana was in a nursing home recovering from a broken shoulder and, while she wasn’t yet aware of it, it was going to be her new home. Even before my mother’s crisis she had realized she could no longer care for her mother, who was suffering from both Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. After 7 years, the road had become too rough even for my mother.

Ironic then, in a horrible sort of way, that within three weeks of my grandmother going to the nursing home that my mother should be diagnosed with cancer. Stage IV. Inoperable. Radiation and chemo ahead and no guarantees. No one talking about time frames and I’m not sure why not, but it’s left unsaid.

So I am staring at the neatly stacked purple towels. My mother has been very precise with them. They are all folded exactly alike, facing the same way, stacked by size and color. And there, to the left and tucked to the side away from the everyday purple towels are the “special” towels. Among them are the towels I bought for her at Christmas, a beautiful soft fluffy white towel embroidered with deep purple irises. Purple is her favorite color. I fell in love with the towels over the internet and knew that she must have them. 

Maybe if I had bought her three sets, or ten, she would have used them as everyday towels. But she had just the one set and there they were, set aside, for who-knows-what. I stood and stared and thought: “we should use the good towels.”

I vaguely remember reading an article by Erma Bombeck as she came to the end of her life. She wrote about using the good china, about burning candles and eating dinner at the dining room table and doing all the stuff we usually reserve for company, but doing it with those who are closest to us.

We should use the good towels. We should dry off with the fringed beauties that hang nearly dusty on our not-to-be-touched guest towel racks. When they get dirty we should wash them, and use them again and again until we tire of them, and then we should buy new “guest towels” and use them some more.

We should not wait until we have cancer or some other life-limiting disease before we eat at the dining room table, use the good china or haul out the silver. Who better than our own spouses and children to spoil with those things?

A couple of years ago I remember setting a beautiful table in the dining room for a Sunday dinner with my husband and our children. Together we have five children and they make a marvelous mixed family that is a blessing to us both. As I lit candles, poured wine and water into crystal glasses, and put out the linen napkins, my middle stepdaughter clapped with delight. “I love it when you have a centerpiece and candles,” she said. “It makes me feel so special.” I resolved right then to try to make all my children feel just that special as often as I can. 

The love we have for our own family is way beyond what we feel for friends and neighbors. And yet, we often reserve the good towels and the china and the silver for the people we hardly know. Our best manners are generally reserved for strangers while we often forget to say “I’m sorry” or “Excuse me” in our own homes.

Civility shouldn’t be reserved for those we know least, and the good towels should be shared with the ones we love best. And standing there in the doorway of my mother’s linen closet, I knew that the way I live my life would change forever. So I pulled out the lovely fluffy white towels and draped them across the towel bar in her tiled bathroom. I admired them and worried about spoiling them…even though I had already decided that was foolish.

I wanted my mother to come home to beauty and caring and the lovely home she had created for so many years. And I wanted her to use the good towels.

P.S. Those towels are still in my mother's closet and I try to take them out and hang them when I visit with my Dad!