Writer in the Forest

Chapter 24

Two weeks into Mom’s coma, I sat in the chair by the window looking at my feverish mother. Her drenched hair curled madly on her oily skin, as if the toxins were climbing over each other trying to escape the blaze. Though I was assured the machine was there to assist her breathing, I hadn’t made friends with it yet. Assisting is one thing. I watched the rain drizzle down the window. Breathing for her because she can’t breathe on her own is another.

When a friend’s mother lay stroked out for days and the days stretched into weeks, she decided to withhold food and water to help her along. I couldn’t starve my mother, I told my friend. How could you do it? You just do, she said. You just have to.

I prayed Mom would get better or die on her own. How could I know, truly know, when it was time to unhook someone—anyone—let alone my best friend. Mom would save me at all costs.

After so many nights here, I got to where the humming and blipping of the machines seeped into my exhausted mind and lulled it into a half-sleep, the kind where you go up the down staircase thinking you might be asleep and going the wrong way, but you can’t wake up. Someone floated out of the whirring and touched me.

“What?”

“We need to talk to you.”

A second nurse was doing something with the tube filled with blue fluid. Mom’s feeding tube.  “She’s shutting down. Her body can’t process the food anymore. It’s backing up.

We need to take the tubes out. The food will keep backing up and…”

“She’ll choke,” I finished. Just like Grandma, I thought.

We all gathered: My Dad, my brother, his wife, my husband, and me. Just as I am, without one plea. Oh, Lamb of God, I come, I come. It’s a sad and silent dip into the river, the brothers and sisters on the shore, Mom draped in white. There were five of us trying to hold her two hands. An hour after they removed the feeding tube to let her die, she sat straight up in bed.

“Mom!” I called out. I want her to know I was here in case she died a second from now. I looked around for my long-dead Grandma. Surely this was that rally you hear about, where they see their dearly departed loved ones and head for the light. I wondered if the Angel was here.

Mom bolted up faster than I have seen her move in thirty years in spite of her diseased and twisted back. She looked around like we were from outer space. Mom was awake, but we would learn she had brain damage.