The one that loved me most
Warning: Sickness and death.
I held her hand that day.
I don’t know what made me do it. We happened to be alone together for a few minutes, before I left with the rest. They’d all already gone out of the room for some reason or other.
So I took her hand. And for a couple of minutes, there was calm.
She had lost consciousness a week before. I hadn’t reached out to her since. What was the point? Was she even there to feel me? I remember reflecting at the time how out of place it seemed.
The next morning we learned early what had happened. Not too early. Maybe we needed our sleep.
Obvious feelings aside, I wasn’t shocked. That’s not to say I was a particularly sane or well-calibrated teenager. Just dissociated enough from my feelings that across the ample days whose daylight hours we’d lurked away in those sterile halls, the conclusion had met little resistance as it settled to the floor of my mind. Inevitable.
My grandfather was offended when I did not cry just when he thought I should. I wonder if, grasping in vain to teach me that tears are not only possible but necessary, there was a moment when he considered that pressing harder on the insect would merely increase its resolve. You know, like a cat automatically leans into you when you nudge it.
My siblings were inconsolable.
The last thing thing she did for me was to sing me Happy Birthday. She slurred her words. Obviously a shadow, but not a distorted one; still the shape of herself, just blurry and sleepy and slow.
I think it was mostly the phenobarbital and the morphine and whatever other lesser evils were sparing her from unending torment and seizures.1 Tumours had long since moved into her brain, but apparently they were not pressing on the right places to erase her before she went.
I can’t remember if she looked at me as she sung to me. I think she did. I want to assume she could still see me clearly.
I’ve never quite been able to let it go: why did I reach out like that? Did I predict what was going to happen that night? That I should say goodbye?
I don’t see how. Oh, I’ve ruminated on it enough. Am I forgetting something about what I perceived? Was she breathing differently? Was the look on her face subtly wrong? Or peaceful? Did the nurses sense something, and somehow telegraph it to an autistic child who could hardly look them in the eye?
If I’d been a cat, would I have curled up beside her, like the ones that pick out all the patients on the threshold?
I don’t know... I don’t know. There’s no record except the images in my mind, ever more distant.
It’s been 18 years. I miss you, mom. Maybe not as much as I should. I’m a strange person, but I guess you’d be proud of me anyway.
It hurts me to say that I don’t believe I’ll ever see you again. Instead, I’ve shared all these words with the part of you I keep with me. And it helped me. You helped me to say this.
You’re still teaching me. You see?
I miss you.