The Night My Mother Died

And the 10 years I punished myself with booze and sex

This is a piece I wrote many years ago, part of two non-fiction books that currently reside in the back of a drawer. Like me, they are works in progress.

It is already dark when I go to the hospital for the last time. I’m wearing a new party dress, hurrying to pay a duty call before leaving with a group of friends for a big night in San Francisco. We’re going to see a new play at the Geary Theater. Our tickets were purchased weeks before. My boyfriend waits impatiently in my living room at home.

The hospital is quiet, almost empty. The click of my high heels echoes hollowly down the wide corridor — too fast. A fat man in a ball cap dozes in a waiting room. A nurse stands at her station with a clipboard, making notes, the harsh scratch of her pen competing with the clatter of my heels.

I control the familiar fear as I approach my mother’s doorway. One, two, three, four, counting the sick people’s rooms as I pass; hurrying past a dangling arm, a protuberant foot, a siphoned nose; wondering what manifestation of my mother I will find this time. Pensive? Bravely cheerful? Obviously drugged? Asleep?

I draw up outside her room cautiously. When I poke my head around the doorway, I’m stunned by what I see. She is staring straight at me — as if she knew I was coming! Her eyes, all black pupils, emanate fear.

“Mama?” I use the old appellation, the one she’d directed me as a toddler to discard for the loftier “Mommy.” Instant tears burn my eyelids, drown the back of my throat.

“Mama, what’s the matter?” But the question is meaningless, ludicrous, almost hilarious. No matter how long I stand acting stupid in the hallway, I can’t escape the knowledge. It is imprinted on every cell.

My mother is dying.

Death is here, in her room.

Death swells behind her curtains, sifts under the door to the toilet, gathers in the corners of the closet, oozes in every drawer. His shape changes with every inhalation: now a shadow, now the hairs rising on my forearm, now a yellow skeleton in long black robes — just like the movies — his bony mouth open wide in a hideous grin.

I enter my mother’s room haltingly. It is dark. My mother is alone here. Where are the nurses? Death is crawling between her blankets! We are both afraid.

During all the long weeks of her illness, my mother has never shown me this face. She sat regally in the hospital bed and asked of my progress at school, the activities of my friends, the state of the weather. We weren’t to discuss it: her dying. She’d rather not. We looked out the windows and remarked on the sky.

Sometimes, I wondered if it was really happening. Sometimes, I wondered at the absence of fear or rage. Sometimes, I thought that she was welcoming Him beneath her blankets — a long-awaited lover, a killer, an escaped convict — taking comfort in the silvery glint of his sharp blade.

She was tired, her five children almost grown, her bipolar husband increasingly cruel. Her body was used up by pregnancies and age. Her legs, slightly bowed, laced with thick blue veins. Her hips, wide with menopause. Her mottled thighs.

Her breast, the breast that suckled me, was sliced off at the root, stored in the hospital basement in a sealed bin of foreskins, diseased organs, amputated limbs and other human garbage, leaving nothing on her chest wall but an angry red scrape.

But tonight, she doesn’t divert my attention; tonight, she doesn’t remark on the sky. Her eyes bore straight through me — to Him. Her face is a mask of fear.

“Mama!”

I move quickly to the bed and gather her body up my arms. She weighs almost nothing. She has no responsive muscles, no resilient fat, no warmth. Already, she is bones.

I press my wet face against her blue and white hospital gown, her shoulder, her neck, her chin. I don’t look at her. I smell her. I breathe her up — into me. I smell the hot chicken noodle soup she brought me when I was in bed with the mumps. I smell her bitter anger when I came home late from a date. I smell the Chanel №5 she dabbed on the inside of her wrists before going out with Daddy, the Jergen’s lotion on her hands when she stroked my chubby, tear-stained cheeks the day my best friends wouldn’t let me play two-square at recess. “Don’t cry, Honey,” she tutored. “Feel sorry for them because their hearts are so small.”

I want to tell her all the right things — all the things I’ve heard on television. How we’ll always remember her. How she’ll live forever in our hearts, in every action we take, in every word we speak, in every thought we think or dream. I want to tell her we all love her, and not to be afraid.

I imagine that this is why she was waiting for me. That she only needs to hear my words before she can let go. I imagine that I am the chosen child, the favorite, the ferryman who can pole her wooden boat across the River Styx. She has shown me her face!

But when I open my mouth to help her cross the river of Death, my throat closes tight and only spit strings out. I can barely whisper, “Mama, please! Mama please don’t die!”

Perhaps she knows.

Perhaps she knows everything I want to tell her. Perhaps she hears more than those six stingy words. Perhaps she reads my thoughts through her bony forehead, feels the tribute in my spit, and will now be at peace. Perhaps my love will help her make the crossing. But when I lower her body back down to the bed, her face is unchanged — a frozen mask of fear. I have said nothing. I’ve given no relief. And when I lift my head to look around the room I see the curtains shifting, a drawer sliding open, the bathroom door swinging ajar…

He is coming! He’s coming for her! He’s here in the room! And He might take me too! I feel a warm drop of pee trickle down my thigh.

I run.

I put her broken body back down on the bed and run.

Her eyes follow me out the doorway, past the nurse with her clipboard, the sleeping man, the indifferent sick. Her eyes follow me as I crash and clatter down the cavernous stairway, too scared to wait for the elevator. Her eyes follow me as I race across the asphalt parking lot, kicking up tiny pebbles in my tumultuous wake.

Her eyes burn two black, smoking circles in my yellow, rancid back.

I don’t look back for her, the woman who held my hand through every real or imagined crisis. I don’t comfort her. I don’t help her. I don’t stay with her.

I run!

I run!

I run!

I leave my mother to die alone. I go to San Francisco with my friends as we had planned. Everyone admires my new dress.

We saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that night, a play about inmates in a mental institution. I sat amid my friends and watched it in my own psychotic state. No one seemed to notice that I wasn’t responding to the action, that I wasn’t myself, that all my attention was focused on the big, black bowling ball of a moment that was steadily rolling toward me in slow motion all night: the moment I reentered my home in Stockton to find out what had happened to Mom.

“Maybe I was imagining it,” I tried to reassure myself. “Maybe Death wasn’t really present in that room.”

I knew that was a lie even before I turned the front doorknob and heard the locking mechanism click. I could feel the misery seeping through the thick wood. The living room was washed in tears.

Jean sat on the couch, red-eyed and whimpering. She opened her wide, red mouth like a fish suffocating on a dock. Daddy sat blanch-faced and vacant-eyed on the blue-flecked easy chair. Claire stepped toward me protectively, reaching out her hand, and opened her mouth to speak.

“Don’t tell me!” I screamed as I almost swooned in the doorway.

“Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I already know!”

I ran up to my teenage girl’s bedroom, where a wind-up ballerina balanced on a spring in a pink and white jewelry box, tiny trolls with orange hair huddled together on the cement block and board bookshelf, and a curly-haired little girl spread her arms wide across a blue-tinted poster with the suddenly ominous message: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Nothing had changed. Everything was different.

The next day I began a 10-year binge of self destruction. The memory of my cowardice was so toxic to me, so difficult to bear, that I forgot what happened almost immediately. But it was still there — the memory — buried deep in my subconscious where it worked its dark magic, keeping me desperate and drunken and seeking out all manner of mean and scornful man to bed me, to remind me just how little I was worth.

It wasn’t until 10 years later, when I was married and had given birth to my first child, that I was ready to search out some self forgiveness. I signed up for therapy, and during my very first session the memory burst to the surface like a beach ball from the bottom of a pool.

“I left my mother to die alone!” I blurted out without thinking. And suddenly the memory stood before me, fully formed. Then began the work of reliving it over and over in therapy, until I could prise free of its grip.

Thirteen years after my mother’s death, I confessed to my sister.

“I knew Mom was dying that night. I felt Death in the room. But I left her. I was scared! I left her to die alone. ”

“Mom didn’t die alone,” Claire said. “We were all there — except you. The hospital called and we went in to be with her.”

“She wasn’t alone?” I was incredulous.

“No. We were with her, holding hands around the bed. She had a peaceful passing.”

I stood dumbstruck with my mouth open and stared at the phone in my hand. Then I felt a fog lifting, and a poison-tipped claw withdraw from my chest.

And now? Now when I remember my mother, it isn’t with grief for my bad behavior. Now I remember Mom with gratitude for all that she gave me, and with sure knowledge of her lasting love.

For more of the good stuff, follow Fourth Wave, where we’re changing the world for the better, one story at a time. Got one of your own? Submit to the Wave!

For more by this author, try: