The last thirty years of my life play in my mind like a B-roll.
The things I remember, and the things I tried so hard to forget.
The way she used to stand in my doorway while my dad would read me a bedtime story, with a soft smile on her face.
The way she would watch me run from the kitchen down the hallway into my dad’s arms, letting him greet me first before they got to say their hellos.
The way she pushed me away while she sobbed on the floor of that very same kitchen, after the police had knocked on our front door and told her a drunk driver had collided with Dad’s car, killing him on impact while on his way home from work.
The way she fell into a deep, dark depression, and turned to the one thing that killed my dad.
Her husband.
Alcohol.
The way she never looked at me again with light in her eyes, only ever darkness, like I was the person who took her love away from her.
Like I wasn’t a living, breathing part of the man who owned her heart.
Like there wasn’t still a part of him alive and well in his child that shared half of her DNA.
She burned through my dad’s life insurance money faster than I ever knew to be possible. But when I was younger, I didn’t needto understand it. All I knew was that I’d just lost the only man who’d ever truly loved me unconditionally.
It was only as I got older that I understood the amount of money he left behind, and just how quickly it vanished.
Within the year, the bank repossessed the house that he worked so hard to make a home, and we moved into the trailer park that she still lives in.
The one she refuses to leave, for some God-forsaken reason.
Though, apparently when I’m out of town, she pretends to live in luxury by putting herself up in my apartment, and has the audacity to act shocked when I come home.
Like I’ve interrupted whatever plan she had for the day by simply existing.
“You can both go in and see her now,” Dr. Mansfield says, bringing me out of my grueling trip down memory lane, and I realize I didn’t catch a single word of their conversation after hearing that my mom had a stroke.
Can she walk?
Can she talk?
The doctor said ‘she’s ok for now’.What does that even mean?
Have we wasted all this time feuding with each other, only for her to succumb to an illness before we had the chance to fix anything?
“You go. I think she’d want to see you,” Mark tells me, walking backward until his legs connect with a seat behind him, and he gets himself comfortable for the long wait that he thinks is coming.
Nodding, I follow the doctor down the narrow hallway, keeping my eyes directly in front of me, careful not to misstep or bump into anybody else.
I don’t look into patients’ rooms. I don’t care to see their family members hunched over their bedside, waiting for them to wake up.
I don’t want to see people with tubes draped over their bodies and shoved inside their noses.
I don’t want to hear the sound of beeping machines, or the voices of doctors telling desperate families that they ‘did all they could, but it was too late.’
I don’t want any of it.
“She’s just in here,” Dr. Mansfield tells me, pressing his hand to the door for me to go inside without him. I want to beg for him to follow me, but he doesn’t.
I close my eyes and force myself to draw in a deep breath before taking my first step inside my mom’s hospital room.
