Writer in the Forest

Chapter 25

Can you sing La Paloma, Mom? Do you know who I am?

She could sing all the verses of La Paloma in Spanish with me, but she didn’t know who I was. Mom and I sang and sang for hours on end. Nurses peeked in and wondered what was happening in room 412.

One thing about it. Mom was now off the narcotics and way calmed down. Maybe this was my new Mom. It was sad, but I could get used to New Mom.

I taped photographs all over the bed rails. Mom looked at them with curiosity, but didn’t remember any of us. She had no reaction when I walked into the room, but she wasn’t afraid of me, either. I wondered if my visits would become a new memory she could hold on to. I reminisced. Mom listened for hours, but didn’t participate.

Bill came. He leaned in close and whispered in Mom’s ear. I stood in the doorway and let him hug me as I cried. Later, Mom would tell me she saw us and dreamed as she drifted into near-death that we were standing in a cave. We were children dressed in school clothes she remembered as she floated through. Before the cave she’d been wandering happily in a field of daisies. She made me promise that I would never again suffer while she was in a coma because the field of daisies was the most wonderful, peaceful place in the world.

She was reminding me of God, in case I needed it.

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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.

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Chapter 23

“I love you,” said Bill, hugging Mom in her hospital bed. For hours we sat, watching and waiting. I would have gotten up, but my legs wouldn’t hold me.

I was studying my brother over the rim of my coffee cup, remembering a day when I was on my back on the kitchen floor in our Chico house, looking up at the faces of the neighbor boys who were holding me down, a live hose in my mouth. The boys were laughing because they could see my underpants as I kicked and struggled. I swallowed water as fast as I could. I’m still here, so I guess they gave me only as much water as I could take.

They say that about God.

I looked at Mom. We only bore a small resemblance. But if  she woke right now she should see a reflection of all she taught me.

North Cascades Highway

Things like having faith and unconditional love.

They say that about God, too.

And maybe, if I remember it just right, I’d had a little pre-Baptism.

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