So many inner-voices show up to tackle the mundane and the life-changing; and they don’t always agree.
Mom arrived around noon to the room she would live in until she died. She knew the facility, although this was a new room. She expressed appreciation for the photos and flowers I had decorated it with. She thanked the two young men who had transported her by ambulance from the hospital. She was weak, but knew how to be polite. It was Friday, September 21.
Her arrival marked the beginning of the end. An end that came nine days later.
My mother died September 30th, one week and two days after being discharged from the hospital, terminal cancer her final diagnosis.
In early September we were talking about her possible discharge home at the end of that month; she was making great progress with her hip replacement rehab, despite continued pain.
We thought we had time ahead of us. She thought she had time.
Then, with a September 15th phone call, our world changed. The resident calling reported mom had terminal cancer. A day-and-a-half later, I’m back east, meeting with dad, mom, doctors, nurses.
A song came on Pandora, a recent country hit. Two verses played before she stomped across the room and hit the “thumbs down” button. Her ex-boyfriend had previously “liked” it.
“Stupid song,” she whined to her roommate. “Too damn bad we can’t “unlike” some of our stupid, whiny friends this way.”
Her roommate looked away and silently agreed.
Daily Post-Inspired: Song
Martha sat with the photo album in her lap, a thin layer of dust drifting from the faded leather. She flipped it open to the first page. Behind yellow plastic she caught a picture of three children—the oldest 7—staring dutifully into the camera, solemn looks on their faces.
She lightly touched the face of the middle child, a girl with braids and dark eyes, before glancing at the photo to the right. In this picture, the solemnity of the moment was gone, the formality of the scene broken as the camera caught the older boy tugging his sister’s braid, her head jerked slightly to the side. The three-year-old had slid off the chair and turned his back on the scene.
Slowly she flipped through the pages, pausing here, lingering there, absorbing images of children at birthday parties, swimming in the lagoon, saying prayers at their bedside. Mostly the pictures reflected a happy time. After closing the last page, she set the book carefully on a settee, then turned to a pile of similar, dusty-leather-bound books and picked up the next one.
For hours she sat there, going through page after page, book after book, until the last one was closed on her lap. The children in this volume were older, 27, 29 and 31. In this one, joy was the exception.
Even when a smile was present, it felt fleeting, ephemeral, glimpsed; captured on the edge of the lips, like a bird pausing on an overhead branch, before flitting off. In those photos—where many frozen faces peered out—the smiles were few.
