Eleven Years Ago
“Hi, Mama…” I drop my bag next to the hospital’s visitor’s chair that has become my second home. I brought in cookies for the nurses on Mom’s floor. Partially, because I bake when I’m stressed, and because I hope it softens the blow of when I’m particularly grouchy with them. I cannot help it. I’m running on next to no sleep, shitty hospital cafeteria food, and I’m furious that hospital visiting hours are keeping me away from her for fifteen hours a day…and that they only let me bend those rules half the time.
I know none of that is the nurses’ fault. Hence, the cookies. Yesterday it was brownies. The day before that, shortbread.
Mom’s asleep when I arrive so I pull out the book I brought from her collection and begin reading it to her. Today’s pick is Anne of Green Gables, the first book she ever read to me.
An hour later, Mom wakes with a murmur and a cough. I reach for her cup of water and hold the straw to her so she can sip. It dribbles out the side of her mouth a little bit, but I clean it up with my sleeve. “We got our wedding photos back,” I tell her, lowering into my chair.
Mom attempts to lift her eyes, but her abilities are sedated by both the drugs and the partial paralysis. She’d refused everything else other than the pain medication and a feeding tube, insisting that she’d not let a machine breathe for her. I had wanted to fight her on it, but she’d already had so many choices stolen away from her, it didn’t feel right to take another. It was impossible, though, to accept the nearing end. That there’d be no miracle.
“Do you want to see?” I ask, already reaching for my bag. I pull out the white cloth album and flip through it, showing her each page, getting as close to lying in bed next to her as I can without breaking any more of the hospital’s rules.
Mom hums when she sees the photo of her sitting in the front pew staring up at Caleb and me with so much pride.
“I like that one too,” I tell her, looking between the woman in the photo and the woman lying next to me today. I hadn’t fully realized how much Mom has changed in these last three months…how quickly she’s faded. “You look beautiful, Mom.” I drop the album to my lap and hold her hand. “So, so beautiful.”
I don’t know if I’d change them, if I’d somehow known, but those were the last words I said to my mother before she fell asleep and never woke up.
She passed later that afternoon, surrounded by all of us who loved her best.
And though I told her how much I love her and how much I was going to miss her, how grateful I am that she was my mom over and over again as she slipped away, I’m glad the last words she might have heard were someone calling her beautiful. Because she was. She really, really was.