a place that can never be

I picked up the phone to call her. My fingers found the buttons to dial the number, but for some reason this time I paused. Here was a phone number I’d take to my grave. A number that hadn’t changed for years. Eternally etched in my mind. And here I am pausing to think what the next number was.
It was just then that it finally hit me. She’s gone.
No more late night gab sessions. Never again would I hear her laugh, her cries, and her advice.
In the final year of my mother’s life I had moved cross country to be with the man I loved. It’s now looking back that I shouldn’t have left.
My mother died of cancer, 7 years ago, on December 8, 2002.
People will always tell you how to grieve. How to act. How to mourn.
Death brings a lot of uncomfortable silence…and casseroles.
I’ve had a lot of moments in the last 7 years where I wish I could just call her up.
925-625-4346. Even now I remember it.
I just wish I could enter those numbers into my cell phone and she would magically be there waiting for me on the other end.
I joke with around with people, when they say they’ll call my mom. I just tell them “Great, if you get a number for her let me know. I’d like to talk with her.”
I originally wasn’t going to fly out when she was dying. I thought that there was no way in hell that I could handle something like that. This was my first experience with death. My father died when I was 2 but I have no memory of either his death or him at all really.
I remember the second to the last phone conversation. I asked if I should fly out and see her. She said she was fine and not to worry.
Course when the cancer was discovered she didn’t even tell anyone till she absolutely had to. I came home sick from work one day and she was home, which was odd cause it was too early. She had a bandage on her neck and I flipped out. She said it was nothing, just had a cyst removed. As if it was something as normal as cutting nails or hair. Just a little something removed. She was always putting on her game face.
Now the last phone call I couldn’t make sense of anything she was saying. I remember talking to my sister and she said it was up to me if I wanted to fly out. I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going. It was my mother’s friend who called me and said they got me a plane ticket and I was to pay her back ASAP.
She told me I had to come and that I was selfish and had always been and that I needed to do this for my mother. And maybe I was being selfish, but it was really about fear more than anything.
I took an extremely early flight. Barely slept that night. And the boyfriend, that amazing man I moved heaven and earth for and gave up the last year of my mother’s life, he couldn’t even take me to the airport.
Special.
I think it was around 11am when I was driving back to the house with my brother-in-law. Had to make a jack in the box pit stop however, they don’t have too many of those in the south.
When we got there she was in and out of consciousness. I just laid in bed with her and talked to her. I had no idea if she understood anything I was saying. I was telling stories of growing up. How when I was little I called her “Mommy Monster.”
All sorts of stories from the past. I was the last person she said anything to before she slipped into the coma. She told me she loved me like 4 or 5 times.
I had decided I was going to stay up the whole night with her. I wasn’t going to fall asleep only to wake up to find my mother had passed.
I went downstairs to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. I was just starting to pour the water into the coffee pot when my sister-in-law ran down the stairs saying something like “Oh my god, Oh my god! Come quick! She’s dying!”
I dropped what I was doing, spilling the water everywhere. To this day I still think about that moment when I’m making coffee.
I ran up there to check things out and my sister went up with me. My brother was a hysterical mess and we had to shove him out of the room. We just watched and waited. I just went into this cycle. Watching my sister, watching my mother. Waiting. Her breathing was almost a gasp by now, as if it was a huge fight to take a breath. Then after awhile, nothing. She had stopped breathing and I think we were waiting for her to spring out of bed and shout “Gotcha!”
She didn’t however. I remember looking at the clock. 9:15pm. All of the t.v. shows and movies where they asked about the time of death, I was having a columbo moment apparently.
I stayed with her body for what seemed like hours. I think it was only 20 or 30 minutes in reality. I just held her hand and sat with her. It wasn’t nearly as creepy as I thought it would be. There was a stillness and a sense of peace in the air. That stillness was of course broken once the funeral home came to collect the body.
You see, my mother wasn’t the smallest lady ever. I don’t know if these guys were wimps or what, but me and my brother had to help carry our dead mother’s body down the stairs. That folks is single handedly the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. All the while we are struggling, the funeral guys are saying “It’s ok, take your time.”
I just said “No. We’re gong to get her body downstairs and on that gurney. Then I’m going outside to freak out!”
And that’s what we did. I ran out back. My sister-in-law followed me out. She asked me if I was ok. I whipped around and screamed “I just carried my mother’s fucking body down the stairs! Do you think I’m alright?”
In a way it feels as if the child in me died with her. A lot changed after her death. Oddly enough my uncle was in town, just so happens. So he was able to say goodbye. We even changed the funeral plans around so he could attend his only siblings funeral. Well he skipped out the night before.
That night I tried to sleep. It was hard to sleep and my mind kept running circles. I was in a huge state of disbelief. I just remember that Christmas tree. My mother loved the color red, so all the lights on the tree were red. It’s normally quite a sight, but eerie seeing it from the next room. Just a red glow.
The night before the funeral there was a viewing. She looked so strange. Almost alien. It wasn’t my mother anymore. I remember thinking about the time when I was in grade school, and we were going over some vocabulary words. I specifically remember the word “Serene.” When she was trying to help me remember the word and it’s definition she would repeat over and over “Serene. Calm. Serene. Calm.”
That’s how she looked. Serene. Calm.
The three children were slated to deliver eulogies. I forget if it was my sister or my brother who went first, I just remember going last. Your brain travels to odd places in times like those. All I could think of was an interview with Cher on Larry King about Sonny Bono’s funeral. She said in order to not pass out while giving the eulogy she locked her knees and grasped the sides of the pulpit. And that’s what I did. I tried not to look at mourning and crying faces. I concentrated on the walls.
At the time I couldn’t wait to leave. I didn’t really feel like I had any support. I just wanted to go home to the boyfriend (ha, home. We didn’t even live together).
When I did leave I had a breakdown in the Atlanta airport. At the time I was living in Chattanooga, TN. I had a 3 hour layover. I didn’t want to deal with anymore of that. I wanted his arms and his support. I called him and told him I couldn’t deal and asked I he could come get me at the airport. These moments should have been a red flag. my mother just died but my boyfriend couldn’t even pick me up from the airport. So silly me, I took a cab.
It must have been a day or two later that I dyed my hair black. I have always colored my hair to fit my mood.
A few weeks later, on Christmas day even, I was fired from my job. The job that originally told me to take all the time I needed. The job that pretended to understand what I was going through, fired me. It was then that I went into a bubble. I just lost it. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t function. I stayed with the ex for a few months. It seemed to help at the time. I was just afraid to be alone. In retrospect I think he couldn’t wait to be rid of me.
So in the end it’s not just a place that cannot be, it’s places. The place where mother and son meet. The place where I played as a child. The place in my heart for a man that didn’t deserve my love. For me it’s more of an emotional place.
Even though she is gone, I believe I’ve taken a bit of her strength with me. There is still a place in my heart where she lives, and that will never be destroyed.
-N