The indoor lighting glows soft and placid. A glossy wall calendar, flipped to October , hangs tacked to a sun-faded corkboard. Tears burn my cheeks. A picture of Mom and me, the two of us smiling on a beach, is perched on the nightstand. This morning I received a call to let me know that things had taken a turn. I better fly down, the nurse said. She tried to put Mom on the phone, but her speech was incoherent. Like a dying character from a bad movie, droning and gurgling, emitting vague sounds, not words.
I told Mom I loved her and hung up the phone and then booked a flight from Dayton to Tampa and called Ryan to drive me to the airport. I had spoken with Mom just yesterday. Her words then were slurred but semi-intelligible, and she was still conscious.
Her short-term memory had been gone for at least a few months, ever since her cancer had metastasized beyond her lungs to her other vital organs and, eventually, to her brain, but her long-term memory seemed intact, everything still there, the good times and the bad, everything from our past frozen in time. We were driving north on Terminal Drive, less than a mile from the airport, when I received the call.
Mom was pronounced dead at this afternoon, October 8, Ryan hugged me and I boarded my plane. The cab ride from Tampa to St. His radio spat out back-to-back Michael Jackson tunes. It is almost 7 p. My sobs are uncontrollable. I want to tell her that I would have done things differently. I want to yell this at her, at everyone. My shirt is wet. I can feel the wreckage on my features.
The tears are a strange catharsis, a release of every spasm of guilt and rage and regret. So much stuff. Everything, especially her hulking antique furniture wedged beneath dwarfish ceilings, seems too large for the space it occupies, like something out of a Tolkien novel. The livingroom is festooned with sentiment : dozens of framed photographs, overstuffed photo albums, artwork she has owned since I was a child.
