YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, THERE MAY BE TRIGGERS HERE.

Almost 32 Years Ago.....

I think we were going to have pizza delivered for dinner, but we never made the call. Instead we stopped at the Burger King drive thru and ordered chicken fingers and nearly got hysterical over the name.  Then we drove from Half Moon Bay to the Redwood City Kaiser, I don’t quite  remember what happened the rest of the night. But here is what happened before that. 

For the past three weeks I had been living back with my mother because her breast cancer had metastasized to her brain causing seizures and stroke like symptoms. The past few days she had slipped into an incoherent twilight state.  I was no longer able to take care of her by myself.  One of my cousins had been staying with us after she got off of work to help me care for my mother.  A call had been made to my aunt and she was arriving in a couple of days to care for her younger sister as she died.  My older sister, a widow of one year with a 4 year old and a one year old, had been able to arrange for someone to take care of her children, and for the first time she and I would be staying with our mother at the same time.  We checked on her throughout the afternoon, dribbled water into her mouth, alternately turned her on her side and back to relieve any pressure points.  Pizza delivery was discussed and my sister went to check on our mother as I looked up the Round Table Pizza phone number.  I remember my sister calling for me from the bedroom, something was going on, something was wrong. I went back to them and saw my mother breathing in strange little gasps.  One of her neighbors was a nurse and told us to call her if we ever needed to. She came over and immediately told us our mother was dying. My instructions from her doctor had been, when this time comes, call the hospital for an ambulance and tell them what was happening and that it was a “no code”.  “No code” means no life saving measures. I called Kaiser, gave the information, gave the facts and hesitated for a moment. Then I made myself say it.  I told them that I was told to say “no code”.  I had just told them to not save my mother’s life.  My sister called for me to hurry up, something was happening.  Back in the bedroom, the neighbor stepped away from bed and pushed me into her place. She told us to keep talking to her, the hearing is the  thing to go.  We babbled at our mother. We told her we loved her. We told her to go into the light. We told her Bapak, her spiritual guru was there waiting for her. We told her it was okay to go. We told her it was okay. Her breaths came shorter and further between. Her eyes stared at the ceiling.  Her breathing stopped and we slowly stopped babbling at her.  Everyone was still. Everyone was silent. She gave one giant gasp, startling us back into our babbling. We kept at it, but that had been the last breath she ever took. I don’t remember if we cried then or not. I remember wanting to shut my mother’s open eyes and discovering it’s not as easy as it is in the movies.  That’s when the hysterical giggling started to pop out here and there.  My sister and I both remembered talking to the ambulance driver and he stood a little to close to the small mobile my mother had hanging in a door way. He would shift his weight and the mobile would get caught in his hair or bump him on the back of the head.  After they left, the neighbor made us promise we would stop and get something for dinner on our way to Kaiser. We promised. We stopped at Burger King and got the hysterical giggles about ordering food and wanting to punctuate every sentence with “and our mother just died.”  We laughed about chicken having fingers. We drove through the twilight past the fields and the farms and the hills. I was twenty three years old, I ate fast food and looked out the car window imagining my mother’s spirit was flying and swooping through the warm September evening, no longer in pain, free. 

“The last night that she lived,

It was a common night,

Except the dying; this to us

Made nature different.”

                                       -Emily Dickinson