This is not about politics. (Don’t read any further if that’s all your interested in today.)
This is about the greatest love you will probably ever experience:
That which comes from your mother.
I feel it is appropriate because today is her day.
And all over Facebook and other places everybody's putting pictures of their mother up today and that's fine.
But I am a writer. Here is what I wrote about my mom dying. It's called
"ALL THE HEART'S FAULT."
And it’s here because this election will pass.
And so will your mother. If she hasn’t already.
And between Bernie and Hillary and the woman who brought you into this world…
You will miss them for a little while…
But her forever.
Because, it’s
ALL THE HEART’S FAULT.
The dog barked in the middle of the night as usual and I told him to "Shut up," as usual. But it was not everything as usual. My wife said "Someone's at the door."
I got up sleepy eyed and reached for my gun in the dark and couldn't find it. I could hear the bell and nobody ever comes to the front door and rings the bell like that and still I didn't realize it was time again.
I opened our bedroom door and climbed over the barrier I had constructed to keep the dogs out of the living room and stumbled to the front door and looked out and it was the police.
It was beginning to come to me. It was time again. I fumbled with the chain lock, dressed only in pants and the officer in front said, "We're sorry to bother you but you must have your phone turned off and someone wants you to call them urgently."
It was coming to me. "Is it a 766 number?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said, I'll have to call dispatch."
I let him in and looked for a pen and glanced at the answering machine while he called in. The red light was blinking rapidly.
He called the number out as they gave it to him and he was as nervous as I was. I wrote it down and thanked him and his woman partner for coming then dialed the number. The people on the other end of the line had never heard of me and wanted to know what the HELL I was doing calling them in the middle of the night. I ran out into the dark street after the police car to get the right number but they were driving away and not looking back.
I checked the messages on the answering machine. My sister was calling and my mother had had a heart attack. Four messages. They had been trying since 11:00 last night. It was 1:30 AM now. My mother might be dead by now. I called. She was still hanging on. The chances were not good. If I were to see her alive I should come now.
My wife packed and we took off with two dogs in the beginning of a predicted and realized ice storm. It was 4 hours at 30 miles an hour - which even at that slow was too fast for the ice on the highway.
I wanted to go fast but didn’t dare. I wanted to go like hell. My mother. My Mom, was dying. And I couldn’t even be there because of a once in a hundred years ice storm.
It was like driving through a cold frozen hell with long icicles hanging down from every tree and not another car on the road the whole way.
And all done - except for the sound of the motor - in complete silence.
Through hills and through long dead straight aways, mile after mile of not knowing.
There were no cell phones for poor people then. There was no update available.
Just driving through a dark frozen wonderland I had never seen before or since
Where there were no lights on except the moon God had left on
in hopes of seeing the woman who brought me into this world alive
And finally the slow motion drive was over and
before me was the hospital my mother had brought me into this world in all those years and tears ago.
And she lay there like a skull covered with skin and no more. Unconscious. I told her I loved her and knew she loved me. My wife cried. My mother did not respond.
Then began the waiting I had seen before with my father 7 years before. Stuck in a waiting room down the hall from your loved one. Only able to see them 15 minutes ever four hours.
On the second visit my mother was conscious and I was so happy and tried to build her spirits up. But she could not talk - a water hose size tube down her throat - and she could not move - her hands were tied to keep her from pulling out the myriad smaller tubes going in and out everywhere.
She tried to tell me something but I told her, "I'm sorry, Mom, I can't understand you."
She gave up. I told her we loved each other and that was all that needed to be said.
My mother squeezed my hand as I touched her shoulder and forehead and I told her I wished I could kiss her but the bed rail was up and it was impossible for me to lean over that far.
That was the last time I saw her conscious.
The times after that, that I went in I tried to talk to her, but eventually ran out of things to say and tears to cry.
I know that I completely broke down once in front of the nurses around the bed and told her I was so sorry for all the things I had done wrong when I was young. I didn’t just cry. I wailed. I cried til I could cry no more.
Later I got a Gideon's and began reading to her in my choking voice about the streets paved with gold and how she would be there, hoping she could hear and not feel all alone in terror.
She held on all through the night though the doctor called us in the conference room and gave her little or no chance. The room was a little square we were to stay in until they came and gave us the bad news. The chairs were purple and the couch orange and every time the door handle moved we thought it was the end. And every time it wasn't. And how long can you stay awake so drowsy. We began to sleep in fits. Jolting awake when a new relative touched the door.
The morning came and my mother was still breathing. The machine was helping her fifty percent of the time. All through the day we waited, hoping my brother would arrive from China in time to say "Goodbye."
At ten o'clock that night we had all moved back into the main waiting room with all the other grieving families of people with loved ones in the cardiac unit. There was no hope but how can you live alone on death row? We all need other people to share our sorrow with.
On my walks in the hall I saw the death gurney parked in front of the cardiac unit and I thought how unfeeling of a hospital to park that there. Everyone knows it's not a bed. Everyone knows it's to roll the dead past the living on. And they did that the first morning. They rolled one who did not make it by all of us and there was much weeping by the family who had gotten tagged. And we knew it was re-wheeled out there for us.
Would it be so hard to construct a hospital where the dead could be taken down in an elevator the back way instead of covered with a blue sheet and paraded in front of everybody - especially the families who know the next body might be their loved one?
I sat and waited more and on TV came tales from the crypt and in the opening scene a coffin opens and an old deteriorated woman sits up and cackles and I tell my nephew to cut that off.
Time passes so slow. My brother and his wife arrive at 2 AM the second morning. They call us in the conference room shortly after. The doctor is wearing moccasins. "In this business you quickly learn you are not God," he says, warming us up for the sales pitch. The pitch is of course, to let her go. No more Code Blues. No more shocking her heart into starting again and again when it no longer wants to.
The first doctor a day ago gave us a similar doctrine but I didn't want to let my mother go. I knew it would be forever. He gave us the medical reasons for all of this and we nodded and the only thing I understood was when he said, "and it's all the heart's fault."
When he left my sister said "I'm surprised you were so civil to him," and I asked why.
She said "because that was the doctor that let daddy get so bad all those years ago."
That cat had said there was nothing we could do for my father and he lay there for 10 days until we moved him to another hospital and he got well. For one month. But one month was so much better than nothing.
But my mother was different. She was ready to die. She was frail and weak and she wanted to go and we had told her - even if she couldn't hear us - that if that was what she wanted, we would miss her, but we would let her go, and for her to do what she wanted and needed to do.
My mother left at 5:20 AM. To be with her husband. My sister said that my mother loved my father so much that if he had gone to hell she would have wanted to go to. Myself, I am an agnostic but I believe that if there is a heaven, my mother IS there.
And I'm stuck here, with the others, living and missing her.
But still it is not like when my father died for he loved life and practically left under protest, kicking and screaming.
Instead my mother left under plan, having picked out her funeral dress, told my sister what she wanted each of us to have. And telling us not to grieve for her.
I will always remember going up there that night, Christmas lights still on an overpass we went under. It was my mother's birthday.
The way I figure it God gave her a birthday present: a trip home to be with her husband. And silly me, I had before, always asked only for the winning lottery numbers. Not for the love my mother had always given me.
My brother and his wife and I and my wife stayed in my mother's apartment the days that followed. Through the visitation. Through the funeral. Then through the division of 77 years of the accumulation of minor things.
Then it was time to gather the dogs from my sisters house and make the trip back to life. We stopped at the grave site and incredibly it was warm enough now that there were bees landing on the roses left from the funeral.. Gathering pollen before the cut blooms dried and shriveled - in a cemetery where only days before had been ice.
And I am sitting in my deceased dad's lazy-boy recliner watching Saturday Night Live on tape early in the morning and they have a skit about an eternal rest mattress for coffins and they show an old woman metamorphosing in her coffin and I just stare. And then the comedian places an odor killer in the box, and the couple buying the mattress asks if that will last forever. And the salesman in the ad says, no, just through the times when the smell is the worst.
And none of this means anything except to me and the remains of my mothers family. And death is just a big joke, and it seems to me, it's just all the heart's fault. And that now I am left without one.
Before my mother died I went to the prayer chapel alone and fell down on the floor and begged and pleaded and prayed with her God to let my mother live a few more years so that we could walk in my backyard and plant tomatoes and talk and play cards and I could have more time to love her.
I even promised him I would throw away all my writings but as you can see, it didn't work.
But it was selfish of me to want to keep her and his wisdom won out.
After they pronounced my mother departed, we all went down in the elevators and out into the brisk early morning air. I glanced to the left and up and there in the deep blue of the sky was one large star and below it, one smaller one. And I could almost feel the smaller star rising, my mother, rising to be with her father, and my father, near the Southern Cross.
And below the stars the sun was almost to rise and the horizon to the East glowed a beautiful light crimson and the night was changing into day, and my mother's life on this earth was changing into her life in God's heaven.
And how could anyone be sad? The very sky itself was telling us to rejoice in my mother being allowed to come home. And we are trying our best to do so.
It is a week later and the dog is barking in the middle of the night. I don't bother to tell him to shut up. I'm too busy thinking. I'm thinking that when the clock stops and the police come to the door we all wish that we had done some things differently and loved a lot more.
I'm thinking that it's all the heart's fault that we love. And thank God that we are able to do so.
And so I am writing again and this is a letter to you my friend, hoping that you are well. Wishing that we could stop the clock and all do things differently and better than before. And hoping that time won't run out before we can chat again. About the cat in the hat or blue suede shoes or the trumpet and piano blues. It doesn't really matter.
As long as we can say that it's not our hearts fault, if we are never close again.
That we tried to love each other til the last God Damned second.
My mother was making a chocolate pie when death decided it was time to knock on her heart. The ingredients were still on the counter in the kitchen. The eggs were ready to break and the milk was ready to pour and the mixing bowl was ready to mix.
And the recipe for it all was there in her own handwriting.
And on the wall leading to her bedroom was a simple plea in an 8 x 10 glass picture frame. I had seen it before, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had troubles of my own.
It said simply, “Dear God, Please send me a friend.”
THE END.
Will Bevis
Gadsden, AL
WillBevis.com
5/8/2016