“Someone’s gotta stop her,” my younger brother Billy whispers beside
me. “She’s going to collapse. Those skinny little ankles.”
She’s sweet, but she’s starting to creep me out. If she calls me by my
mom’s name, I might lose my shit.
“I tell Louis to turn down the radio,” Cousin Cary continues, getting
excited about his story. “Because I’m trying to figure out exactly where the
noise is coming from. Thought we might be dragging something.”
Mom had been sick for months before she was diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer. According to Dad, she’d dealt with a constant pain in her
back and abdomen that she’d ignored as the aches of getting older—and
then a month later she was dead. But to me, this all started only a week ago.
A call in the middle of the afternoon from my brother Jay urging me to
come home, followed by another from my dad saying Mom wasn’t going to
be around much longer.
They’d all kept me in the dark. Because she hadn’t wanted me to know.
How messed up is that?
“I’m talking about, for miles, this knocking around in there. Now, we’re
all pretty baked, okay? You gotta understand. Ran into this old-timer hippie
freak back in Myrtle Beach who hooked us up with some kush—”
Someone coughs, grumbles under their breath.
“Let’s not bore them with the details,” Cousin Eddie says. Knowing
glances and conspiratorial smirks travel among the cousins.
“Anyway.” Cary starts up again, hushing them. “So we hear this,
whatever it is. Tony’s driving, and your mom,” he says, gesturing his glass
at us kids, “is standing in front of the freezer with a bong over her head like
she’s about to beat a raccoon to death or something.”
My mind is far, far away from this ridiculous anecdote, jumbled and
twisted with thoughts of my mother. She spent weeks lying in bed,
preparing to die. Her last wish was for her only daughter to find out she was
sick at the last possible moment. Even my brothers were forbidden from
being at her bedside in the slow, agonizing slip into her final days. Mom
preferring, as always, to suffer in silence while keeping her children at a
distance. On the surface it might seem she did it for the benefit of her kids,
but I suspect it was for her own sake—she wanted to avoid all those
emotional, intimate moments that her impending death would no doubt
trigger, the same way she avoided those moments in life.
In the end, she was relieved to have an excuse not to act like our mother.
