Gail tried to stand, but found she couldn’t yet. She began to cry as the first hailstorm hit, and she saw her mother’s scream again and knew she would be seeing it many, many times before it would dissipate. “No one deserves this!” she said. “Not even her. No one. Not this way.”
The nurse didn’t question her, just stayed and rubbed her shoulder until she could stand and return to her mother’s room. Her mother was quiet now, the respirator forced down her throat, its gusts making her chest heave and fall. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t blink. Gail noticed that the covers were arranged in such a way that she couldn’t tell that there was only one foot under there.
Gail stood by the side of the bed and squeezed her mother’s hand. There was no squeeze back. Her mother’s eyes stared, opened, unfocused, and Gail wondered where her mother was, where her brain took her, what she was thinking or dreaming. Was her life flashing behind her eyes? Was she seeing it all again?
Gail certainly did, over the next two weeks. While her mother lay still, burning slow with a fever that set in with the birth of gangrene on the remaining leg, and then in her mother’s gut, Gail went cold with hailstorm after hailstorm. Old memories left her angry and hurt, new memories stunned her silent. Her mother never blinked, never spoke, but appeared to move steadily toward the doorway of death until Gail, as power of attorney, ordered the respirator removed, the life support stopped. For just over twenty-four hours, Gail remained in that room, the only sound the quiet whoosh of oxygen from the mask on her mother’s face, and she tried to find a balance between wanting her mother dead and not wanting her to die in this way. This horrible, unthinkable way. Gangrene like sin seeping in. Devouring her. Swallowing organs whole, skin, colon, lungs, heart. Until that last final breath that came when Gail stepped away, just for ten minutes of fresh air and a broader world, and exhaled her mother to a place where she could no longer be touched. Nor reached nor forgiven nor loved nor hated. Nothing. There was no mother. Never again.
Hailstorm after hailstorm after hailstorm.
****
In her mother’s apartment, Gail held the urn and wondered where to put it. Finally, she set it on the couch while she moved a few things from an end table. A plant. An ashtray, an unsmoked cigarette still in it, a lighter close by. The remote control from the television. Then Gail placed the urn and centered it exactly on the table, as she knew her mother would want it.
“So,” Gail said. “You’re home now. At least until I get this place cleaned out and we give up the lease. Then I don’t know where to put you.”
Gail knew she wouldn’t take her mother home. Her own house was a haven against her past, filled with things she loved, her collections, her clothes, paintings chosen when gasps forced her to stop, to look, to walk into a gallery. There were no photographs except for one, her cat sitting on Santa’s lap, taken four years before. But her mother hated dark and close places, and what else is a grave but dark and close? So where else to put her?
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