Two years ago tonight
Two years ago tonight I received the worst phone call of my life. Despite years of mental and emotional preparation that started when the words ‘terminal cancer’ were spoken out loud in a small clinical exam room in Indiana, my dad’s strangled voice on the phone felt like a physical shaking. “Come home. She’s had a seizure. Can you get on the next plane out?”
It was 3:00am. It felt like the floor was quaking beneath my feet. I slid my hands along the hallway walls in the dark, fumbling for the light switch, and held onto my roommate’s bedroom doorframe to keep from pitching to the floor. I couldn’t breath. I couldn’t choke out the words to her, terrified, now sitting up in bed, light from the doorway now highlighting the fear on her face.
Even now, 2 years later, I am shaking as I type this. I can close my eyes and feel again my throat constricting, hear the sounds of hangers clinking as I pulled clothes–any clothes–off of them and blindly stuffed them in a bag. I remember running, stricken, from flight desk to flight desk at the long Atlanta terminal, desperate for the earliest, fastest flight. Explaining again and again, “I have to get home. It’s an emergency”. My shoes are slapping the tile floor, my eyes rolling, roving, crazy.
I can relive the startling clarity of those moments, and a thousand other tiny and looming pains over the next two weeks, with just a seconds’ pause. Memories of measuring out medications, of cool dry hands, whispered conversations with hospice nurses, fog frost on the garden’s skeletal remains, red birds on the feeder outside her window, the steady hum of the air bed motor, the smell of a cherry popsicle melting in a green fiestaware bowl. The memories are overwhelming, and have lost none of their power to evoke a visceral response even two years later. They are not uniformly bad memories, but they are all powerful, immediate, devastating.
Devastating because the immediacy of my mother herself has faded immensely in the past two years. My sense of her is strong, but blurry, like a bright colored photograph all out of focus. I have a difficult time recalling precise conversations, the sound of her voice, the words we exchanged during a million mundane conversations. I want to tell the little stories of my life with my mom, but the specifics evade me. I can remember family lore, the myths, the larger than life and oft’ repeated stories, but I cannot recall the bulk of any single conversation we had while driving to school, or dentist appointments, or soccer practice. What did she say to me, not in my first prom dress, or on my first day of high school, or when I left for college. I still have strong memories of many of those moments, but I am losing all the seconds and thirds and fourths in between. My mom was a master at living in the moment, and I am quickly losing all the mundane, ordinary, holy moments we shared over our 25 years together.
I remember now, and will always, I think, remember valentine’s day 2010 with sickening clarity. Where I was, what I felt, what was said. That would be easier to live with if I could remember even half as well, the 24 February 14ths that came before it, and where I was in relation to my mother. What she told me, and how it felt, and the unexamined, unappreciated, utterly taken-for-granted knowledge that my mother was breathing, living, laughing, loving somewhere precise and real in this world, and–just maybe–thinking of me.
