"This is Nurse Barton with the Intensive Care Unit at St. Mary's Hospital. I'm calling your brothers, also. You'd better get down here. Your Mom's not doing so good."
Wet snow falling across lonely fields, the hospital hidden behind a fortress of trees, as we race against the elements for a chance to say goodbye, but Mom is gone already when we get there. Mom is yellow, eyes closed, mouth open in silent astonishment, the tubes and ventilator gone, the room neatly empty and devoid of the machines that sustained her in the previous weeks, the bright and hopeful pictures her grandchildren drew for her still tacked to the walls.
There isn't enough emotional energy to be angry at the hospital for calling us after she had already died, less concerned that she had to die among strangers than with the possibility of a malpractice suit. The time of death on the death certificate will read 6:04; I'd like to be angry that they didn't call sooner, I should be, but all I can think of is the starkness of imagining her dying alone. Did she wonder where her family was during her final hours, when it dawned on her that she was dying? Probably not; Mom wouldn't have wanted to bother us with something as secondary, as transcendental, as her passing.
Nurse Barton recalls that when they wheeled her out for tests earlier in the day, Mom waved goodbye to everyone in the ICU, thinking she was headed back upstairs to where they tend to recovering patients. For the first time I realize how fragile and fleeting life is, and wish that it were I she had waved goodbye to.
I remember so many things about you, Mom, and they seemed to have happened so quickly...
I remember you tucking me in, in a small bedroom, on the top bunk, I feel safe. You're sitting in the bleachers behind me as the pitch speeds by, I know you're there. Our family at Shell Beach, lazy days in the sun, those endless summers, jumping in the ocean, selling lemonade and your chocolate chip cookies from a rickety stand of nailed-together two-by-fours by the side of a quiet road. The Hamptons, miniature golf, soft ice cream, Go-Karts.
You and I moving to Florida, you for a new job and to escape the shadow of divorce, me in desperate need of a fresh start. We're piloting a unwieldy U-Haul down a tiny street with a rain gutter down the center, a quiet street framed by palm trees to a rented house, a exact replica of every other in this planned community. The relocation works for both of us, and then I'm back from school walking in with my things, with bags of dirty laundry, your pleasure at seeing me lighting up your face.
Home was always wherever you were.
When I was angry or frustrated, when I was trying to piece my marriage back together, when I would drink too much coffee and talk about myself, you would always listen. You would always say the right things, always take my side.
The years alone weighed so heavily and so privately on you, until finally I found you in your unkempt, smelly house, and you were slumped over, pathetic, snoring, a plastic cup full of port in front of you. You were on verge of drinking yourself out of a job when you pulled up just short of the precipice.
I'm sitting next to you at a table of strangers with sad faces, chain smoking. I hear fear and humiliation in your quiet voice, as you admit you want their help. I'm not really believing that this is happening but it is. The resentments that have hounded you in these later years melt away. People you have long resented are listed methodically on a notepad with a description of the wounds they inflicted on you (therapy recommended by your sponsor?), and you are you again, delighting in what there is to be delighted about, shrugging off the rest.
There you are at peace in the casket, holding the red poker chip proclaiming your sixth month of sobriety, your face covered with more make-up than your humility would have ever permitted. Your grandson, five years old with blonde hair, waiting until no one is in the room where you lie in state to silently approach the casket and stare at you as you rest, dashing away like a startled rabbit if anyone enters the room.
Sometimes we smell you in our house, are you there? Your final words to me come in a discarded, never-sent letter intended for someone named Pat: "I'm often sustained by my sense of the natural world and its underlying harmony and order, that survive change and upheaval, and include death and rebirth."
I imagine you now as in a picture we find cleaning out your home, retiring the remnants of your eventful life, a picture of you as a little girl with your family, with Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle Chuck. I imagine you now with your family again, that little girl with the curls, the smirk twisting up the side of your face, leaning on your chubby little girl's arm, happy and content, where you belong.
The story Underlying Harmony is Copyright 1998 by Steve Biersdorf.
The collection of works called Fish Eggs For The Soul is Copyright 1998 by Brian Rickman.
Copy edited by Sara Fawbush, editor of The Young Writer's Collection.