Shelling Peas

by Jerry Blackerby

It hurts to see someone you love lose touch with reality. I saw my mother-in-law remember shelling peas from her past; illness had taken her mind.

She shelled peas all of her life. Growing up in southeastern Oklahoma, my mother-in-law married her first husband when she was 15 and lost him nine years later after an illness. She outlived her second husband, my wife’s father, by 19 years. She worked hard every day of her life until her health prevented her working. After two radical mastectomies and hip replacement surgery, she began living in the past. She was 81 when liver cancer took her from this life.

The last time I saw my mother-in-law alive, she was sitting on a sofa, wearing slacks and a blouse. I watched her reach for a large ashtray on the coffee table and set it by her side on the sofa. The ashtray became a pan (in her mind). She carefully spread her legs and mashed her imaginary apron down into her lap. She picked up an imaginary sack of peas from alongside the sofa and dumped them onto her apron. She folded the top of the imaginary brown paper sack down twice and set it between her feet. When she folded the imaginary sack, her hands were positioned as if she really had a sack.

One by one, but with gathering speed, she shelled the larger peas. The smaller ones she snapped. As she shelled or snapped the peas, she dropped them into the pan (ashtray) by her side and dropped the shells and strings into the imaginary sack at her feet. I sat awestruck watching her. The scene was so real I could visualize everything, yet all in her imagination.

One daughter looked up and said, "Mother, what are you doing with that ashtray? You don't smoke!"

My mother-in-law came back to reality for a moment. She looked confused and set the ashtray back on the coffee table. She looked at her lap and at the floor by her feet. There was no apron, no peas, and no brown paper sack. Her eyes darted all over the room as she tried to understand where she was and what she was doing. She sat befuddled for a moment and then drifted off into some other reverie.

I got up and left the room quickly as I could not hold back the tears. In my mind, I had seen everything she had done. Her movements were so realistic that I knew exactly what she was doing. I never saw her alive after that day because she went home to be with the Lord a few days later. My wife was sitting up with her when she took her last breath.