n o w p l a y i n g - s c r i p t b i n - f a n c l u b - s t u d i o

make love to the camera



March 21, 2005 - 12:34 am

March

The hospice nurse knew death when she saw it coming. "She's about to take her last few breaths," she said. My brothers and I moved somehow closer to my mom's bed. I kept holding her hand.

* * *

I went to the grocery store the other day, for the first time since she died. As I walked down a certain aisle, I found myself missing that I wasn't buying tea for her.

* * *

At the wake, my mom's lawyer sighed, shook her head, and told me "As clients go, your mom was great."

* * *

On Wednesday morning, March 9th, my mom got out of bed. She came into the living room and climbed into the hospital bed. "Oh, I'm so tired," she said. "I'm going to go back to sleep for a while." It was the last cogent thought she ever expressed.

* * *

On the morning of her wake, I called her bank to move some of her home equity line of credit into her checking account. I told them she had passed away the previous Friday, and I wanted the money to pay for the wake, funeral and cemetary charges, around $10,000. They were very sorry, and although my name is on her checking account and I'm the sole executor of the estate, I wasn't on her home equity account, an oversight. "We can't make loans to people who are deceased."

* * *

Until yesterday, most of my mom's clothes were on her bedroom floor or in her closet. Her sisters and a close friend came over to go through the stuff. Now, most of the clothes are sitting here in bags waiting to go to a black church on the south side.

* * *

At the wake, numb. I'm sitting fifteen feet away from my mom's body making jokes and laughing with my friends.

* * *

The hospice nurse had to take away all of my mom's leftover medications: morphine patches, liquid morphine, codeine, atavan, more more more. "I want to hold on to the vicodin," I told her. "That's fine," she smiled.

* * *

When you call a life insurance company to collect on a policy, the customer service rep tells you how very sorry they are before asking for the policy number. Then it's on to the next caller.

* * *

"If there's anything I can do, please let me know."
"If you need to talk, about anything, I want you to call me anytime, OK?"
"What are you going to do now?"

"You should really quit smoking."

* * *

On the morning of the funeral, my brothers and I forgot to bring my dad's ashes to put in the casket with her. We had to send a friend home to find them. He tore apart her room before I finally told him exactly where they were. He met us at the cemetary, box of ashes tucked under his suit coat like a secret package.

* * *

In the days leading up to when she went to sleep, we knew she was suffering. I was sitting in my brother Barry's room. "I hope she dies soon." His voice was cracking. "I can't believe this, but I hope mom dies soon."

* * *

My mom said she dreamed that her own mother told her that she was coming to get her when it was time. No word on what dad was up to. "He's probably off playing banjo with your uncle, and waiting," my mom's sister, our aunt, offered. We agreed. He was never really very good with this sort of thing.

* * *

The day she died, her sisters were downstate, on their way back from picking up our cousin, who had been in a car accident the day before. I avoided calling their cell phone, as I didn't want to tell them she was dead while they were driving. When they pulled up, I met them outside. "Is she still with us?" was the way they put it. I told them she wasn't, and we hugged and I led them inside. Her body had been cleaned and made presentable by the hospice nurse, and I'd surrounded the bed with every candle my mom ever owned.

* * *

When the old men from the funeral home came to take her body, I noticed they were wearing suits. "What a horrible job to have to do in a suit," I remember thinking, as they loaded her onto a stretcher and carried her down the front steps. I couldn't imagine anything else they could have worn that would have been acceptable, though.

* * *

Maybe fifteen minutes after she died, after my brothers and I had aimlessly dispersed to other corners of the house, I came back into the living room. The nurse was waiting. I don't know why I asked it. "Are we officially done?" I said. For some reason, as I said this, my arms made the same motion for 'safe' that umpires in baseball games use.

* * *

Tuesday, the day of the funeral, I went to sleep thinking that the casket must have been in the ground by then.

* * *

After a funeral, it's been a family tradition to invite everyone who wants to go to a polish banquet hall called the White Eagle. The food is gloppy, white, and bland. In short, polish food. My brothers and I always hated that place, and when someone offhandedly mentioned that there was a Red Lobster near the cemetary, I jumped on it. "Yep, Red Lobster, that's where we're going." One of my aunts was extremely unhappy about that decision. She still wanted White Eagle. We say that on the day we bury our mother, we get to have coconut shrimp and pina colada sauce if we damn well please.

* * *

Her breathing did noticeably change, but I can't remember how. All I remember is that one moment, she was breathing and alive, and the next she was not breathing and dead. I sat in a chair on the middle, holding her hand. My brother Barry was on my left, kneeling, hands on her legs, and my brother Bob was standing to my right, hands at his sides. Watching her breathe those last few breaths was like watching the second hand of a clock tick, waiting for that next second to be ticked off. That next tick doesn't come, and a body becomes just a body and nothing else.

The only sound was coming from the now useless oxygen mask. The hospice nurse, a beautiful woman, an ocean of sympathy and help, sat on the couch behind us, out of eyeshot. We all began to cry, in that noiseless way that selfconscious men that don't want to be caught crying cry, and our hands found one another's backs.

After a few minutes, I took the oxygen mask off her face and we all just kept sitting there.

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