The doctors had told us that she wouldn’t even last a year. But my mother had surprised us all with three additional years of home-cooked meals, bright smiles, and immeasurable wisdom even through the pain. So as I sat near her hospital bed every evening last week, I prayed it was just another scare and that the doctors were wrong again. But I knew better. We all knew—my father and my sister and I.
My mother was so pale and weak. Lying there, she looked so helpless and so old. It was like all the life had been drained from her body before it really was. She was the living, breathing dead. She was a cancer skeleton with her bald head and frail body. If I hadn’t felt like I was dreaming at the time, I am pretty sure I would have been crying.
Tears wouldn’t come, though. All I could do was picture all the memories we shared. I kept thinking about how weird it was helping her pick out a wig in the morning when I used to help her pick out a hairstyle and how she tried to hide her weariness when she came back from chemotherapy. I could see her take a deep breath and put on a big smile for us kids to try and hide the pain and sadness we all knew she felt. She held on so long. We thought she would never burn out . . . until last Sunday.
Last Sunday we ended up in the hospital, where the whole journey started in the first place, where we first learned she had cancer. At that same hospital is where her journey ended and she died. When she closed her eyes and her monitor flat-lined, I was finally able to cry. I felt like I was crying for her as well, because she never felt comfortable enough to cry around us. I doubt she even frowned. I cried twice as hard.
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