We laid on our sides on her bed. Me, curled in a ball with him curled around, enfolding me. We laid on her bed while she lay in another bed, dying in a hospital 8 miles away. I heaved body-racking sobs while he held me, his strong, steady support the only thing keeping me tethered to the Earth, or so it seemed. It felt like gravity had given up on me.
I remember saying over and over, 'I don't want to do this. I just don't want to do this.' I meant, of course, that I didn't want to go through what was coming. I wanted, in the most desperate way, to go around it. To wish it away. To wake up and find it had all been a dream. You know, a bad dream. One that leaves you feeling weird, even over your morning tea. Any bad dream would be better than waking up, again, to find your reality altering itself so horribly. To find that a new normal is unfolding and there's no way to stop it. A new normal that's not going to include your mother.
I didn't want to watch my mother die. I didn't want to sit at the funeral home and hear people's condolences. I didn't want to go to her funeral.
There are a lot of things that I thought I knew about myself before my mom got sick. Before accompanying her to the precipice, knowing that she was going to go sailing off into the abyss and that I would be left alone on the edge, little rocks crumbling at my feet. Crumbling and falling in along with her, while I stood watch. While I witnessed and wavered there. Swaying a little. Woozy from the loss.
I knew, for instance, that I would never, ever be able to touch a dead person. Having attended countless funeral home viewings, watching people lovingly caress their dead, I was certain that the small beads of cold revulsion in my belly would prevent me from making physical contact with a corpse. No matter who it was.
Responding to my sister's 11:30pm The-End-Is-Near summons, I rounded the corner on my way to the hospital room and the nurse said, 'I'm sorry.' I knew my mother was gone. But there she was, right on the bed. Her body was cool. Not cold. Cool in an unnatural way. The way that passes heart-collapsing information right through your fingertips, up your spine and into the back door of your brain. I touched her again in the casket. I stroked her hair, her hands. I gave not one moment of thought to any onlookers' cold beads of revulsion. Because she was my mother. I knew her. Knew her. The way that her cheek felt against mine when we hugged, the way her hands looked when they were covered with flour from baking, the sound of her laugh, the vaccination scar on her arm and the birthmark under her eye.
I simply didn't think about it until later. About how I surprised myself.
I surprised myself over and over and over.
Knowing yourself, not just *thinking* you know yourself, but really knowing yourself requires examination and insight and observation of your life, of your behaviors. I've lived an examined life, to be sure (the therapy bills say so, anyway) and being that it's a priority for me, I know myself pretty well. I have to say, though, that it was interesting, refreshing, even, to surprise myself. To see what behaviors, what responses, what experiences expressed themselves, without my full awareness. And thinking about that, talking about that, gave me a comfortable place in my head to process the overwhelming and sometimes terrible reality.
In a weird way, it's not so much different from ushering a baby into the world, this ushering a loved one out. At least that's how it felt to me. When I walked into the room, despite my mom's physical body lying on the bed, it was incredibly obvious that she was gone. 'Where the fuck did she go?' The Little Sister and I asked each other.
Two years later, when I watched The Nephew come into the world, a brand new person, materializing out of nowhere, we asked each other, 'Who is that? Where did he come from?'
And The Little Sister would, every so often, look at him and ask him this:
'Are you my mother?'
