I heard the sucking sound of the ventilator, in and out like a snoring hyena, the beep of the heart rate monitor, the same tone as those hearing tests I was forced to have every year growing up, and the gurgling sound of the IV pack, dripping its last drops of glucogen and protein into her veins. This is how I decided to spend my mother’s fifty-ninth Mother’s Day, sitting by her hospital bed, holding her fat white hand, looking at the U-shaped stitches of her bald scalp where they’d operated, three days earlier, after her cerebral hemorrhage.
She hadn’t opened her eyes yet, but they said she would in about a week. And then, a week after that, she’d be able to breath without the ventilator, so she’d be able to talk. Oh, how Mama liked to talk – an endless streak of gossip, politics, and family history, always the last to finish her meal, long after everyone else had ate their final morsel. She’d be going at it, her non-stop monologue, bitchy and intimate all at the same time, self-centered and generous in every sentence.
At least the stroke had affected her right side, so she’d be able to talk. The left side controls verbal capabilities and logic, they’d told us – but the right side, massively damaged, controlled her imagination and her emotions. Well, maybe that’d be a blessing, this woman who’d never gotten over her mother’s death when she was only seven – perhaps she might no longer feel that pain ...
Happy Mother’s Day, Mama ... if you can hear me in there. Show me a sign, let me know that you understand. And then – as if God had willed it himself, she lifted her right hand, and then patted my own, three times. And then it rested, once again.
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