of the last few memories #1
Images and sounds and smells all shift in my head. Even when I tell myself it's been four months. Not quite a full four months, but nonetheless, our steps have moved ahead even as I run some scenes of my mother in my head.
I sit with my dad in his room, spending time reading, while he browses the online health guides that he trusts. Not that we need to talk, but I feel better just being around him. The same room where the last night my mother spent in our house, I was sleeping on a foldable metal/plastic chair-bed, at the foot of my parents' bed, half-awake and half-torn listening to my mother's incoherent ramblings into the night.
Her water-bloated legs would fall from the bed, and I would get up quickly to lift her leg, maybe the left, then maybe the right, up, back onto the bed and cover them with her thin blanket. Dad would be soothing her pain-filled skeletal chest as he urged her to rest.
My last night with my mother in her room. Where she would mutter that she's all right, that everything's okay, but everything wasn't okay. Not when we had to, all four of us, even my brother who has yet to find his heart, carry her, seated on a very heavy chair, down three flights of stairs. Because she could not bring herself to move, because she would suddenly moan and border on slight catatonic-behaviour, and that bitter memory I have of my next-door neighbour, would be that look in her eyes, shielding her grandson away as he asked in his innocent voice, why we were carrying my mother into my dad's car.
The same neighbour who till date, never expressed concern, nor sorrow at our loss. Oh, wonderful, wonderful neighbour of mine.
I never expected that my mother wouldn't come home again from the hospital. Petulant little sulkface child that I have always been, wouldn't doctors be miracle workers? Wasn't my mother the most pious and loveliest woman I knew?
I sit with my dad in his room, spending time reading, while he browses the online health guides that he trusts. Not that we need to talk, but I feel better just being around him. The same room where the last night my mother spent in our house, I was sleeping on a foldable metal/plastic chair-bed, at the foot of my parents' bed, half-awake and half-torn listening to my mother's incoherent ramblings into the night.
Her water-bloated legs would fall from the bed, and I would get up quickly to lift her leg, maybe the left, then maybe the right, up, back onto the bed and cover them with her thin blanket. Dad would be soothing her pain-filled skeletal chest as he urged her to rest.
My last night with my mother in her room. Where she would mutter that she's all right, that everything's okay, but everything wasn't okay. Not when we had to, all four of us, even my brother who has yet to find his heart, carry her, seated on a very heavy chair, down three flights of stairs. Because she could not bring herself to move, because she would suddenly moan and border on slight catatonic-behaviour, and that bitter memory I have of my next-door neighbour, would be that look in her eyes, shielding her grandson away as he asked in his innocent voice, why we were carrying my mother into my dad's car.
The same neighbour who till date, never expressed concern, nor sorrow at our loss. Oh, wonderful, wonderful neighbour of mine.
I never expected that my mother wouldn't come home again from the hospital. Petulant little sulkface child that I have always been, wouldn't doctors be miracle workers? Wasn't my mother the most pious and loveliest woman I knew?