The Magic of Thinking Big
I was awakened this morning in room 914, after a mere four hours of sleep, by a nightmare featuring my mom. In it, she was still alive, and her normal pleasant self. She was comforting me, for some small dose of life’s unhappiness I cannot recall now. She brought me small presents, a book and a rag doll. In the dream I am infuriated at her inconsideration. I would never read this type of book! I don’t like this dorky doll! I reject her and her presents and she feels terrible.
In the world of the non-dreaming, my mother is dead. Eleven months ago, she lay in the back bedroom, her room, and grew weaker and weaker. Tumors the size of clemintines, of grapefruits, distended her abdomen in comical ways, a big burlap sack of rubber balls, only the burlap was her skin. A clear tube carrying oxygen ran beneath her nose in a polystyrene space-age handlebar mustache. More tubes ran into her and out of her. As her own breath became softer and more sporadic, the air-pumping mattress to prevent bedsores was added to the bedroom's menu of hospital equipment, it's steady respiration gradually replacing her own.
I slept next to her electric hospital bed, in a twin bed that someone had given my family. My sister and I took turns feeding and washing her, helping her lift herself onto a plastic bedpan, and answering the comments that became more and more bizarre as the conga line of cancer promenaded all around inside of her, and made a final sweep of the big room that contained her brain.
She died, at home, all of us there, the way she wanted to. After her gasping stopped, and the surprised wide-eyed-gaping-salmon-mouth expression was permanent on her face, we listened to her heart with a stethoscope, and tried to get a blood pressure reading, exactly the way the hospice DIY Pocket Handbook of Homemade Dying had told us to do. Just like in the movies, I took my two fingertips, and closed her eyelids, so she wouldn’t keep staring at nothing like that. My sister gave her a pedicure, even though her feet wouldn’t show in her coffin. She used a nice shade of pink that would be the perfect compliment to the dress she had picked out to be buried in. It was the same dress she had worn to her eldest daughter’s wedding, only four months before.
Now I sleep in that room once again. The artifacts of my mom’s life and death are perfectly preserved in the places they were left eleven months ago. Her blue electric bedsore mattress lies flaccid now, across the blue electric elevating recliner we placed in her room so she could sit up in and look out of the window, had the urge arisen. Her grey plastic shower bench sits next to the toilet in her bathroom, now a sort of coffee table holding my sister’s ashtray and a few magazines. Her many books on positive thinking and the mindset of a successful salesman lie in wait in the drawers of her furniture and on the surface of her dresser. Her room is a diorama of a time capsule, a piece of the house her and my father shared that is now mostly forgotten.
I frown down at one of her books, A Millionaire’s Notebook. My mother lived her entire life with the specter of "What If?" hanging over her. She dreamed of a perfect life spent adorning her size 8 perfect body with baubles she had picked up at Cartier. Never mind that her body was sagging and actually a size 22, never mind that the local Cartier was actually a Kmart filled with blue light specials and inconsolable children. Now looking at all she aspired to be, and the sum of the truth that fits so well in this small musty room, I am filled with sorrow on her behalf, and on my behalf. I pray silently not to repeat her many mistakes. I try to remind myself that happiness is to be found in embracing the reality of what is, not by stuffing it deep down under the weight of What Could Be. So far, so good.