So, I wrote my first writing assignment for my online advanced nonfiction class tonight. It was a blast essay which is limited to 750 words. I wrote about the day that I learned my mother was dying. It’s a bit depressing, maybe morbid but I’m going to include it here for your perusal. Also of note, I am pursuing a Masters of the Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. My primary concentration is history and my secondary concentration is rhetoric and writing.
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**The Day the World Turned Dark**
I opened the sturdy wooden door and walked into the moderately lit room. It was quiet. The only sound that could be heard was the occasionally mechanical noises from the IV pole and my mother’s soft moans.
I put one foot in front of the other as I stepped onto the sterile tile floor of my mother’s hospital room. I looked at the woman lying in bed, a person who sometimes I barely recognized. Her face was chubby from the steroids she had taken. She had peach fuzz that replaced the short brown hair cut she once sported. Her eyes were closed and she laid still with the only thing moving being her chest with every breath she took
This is my mother. The woman who had raised me the past sixteen years with my father was now breathing some of her last breaths in front of me in that hospital room, in that hospital bed. I had just been told by my father, in front of the hospital’s social worker, that the leukemia my mother been battling had spread to her brain. The cancer had finally become terminal. Her doctor did not believe she would live to see the weekend. It was Monday afternoon in late July 1999.
My life as I had known it was ending. After a year of being in this hospital with my mother, who had undergone multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, a failed bone marrow transplant and six stem cell transplants, the end was near for her. I was going to lose the only mother I had ever known. My childhood was not the greatest but it was not as ugly as others had. She might have been emotionally and mentally abusive at times, having called me to my face the son my father never had due to the fact that I loved sports and was a tomboy, but she was still my mother. This was the only mother I ever knew and the only mother I ever wanted.
Another moan. The moan escaped her mouth despite the fact that my mother’s doctor had put her on a constant morphine drip to ease the pain. She was already in a coma due to the Leukemia having spread to her brain. This thought, that the morphine eased the pain, was the delusional thought my sixteen-year-old self-thought to ease the pain of watching my mother to see if that breath would be her last. Instead of wondering, is that a moan of pain I would think, is that a moan to leave this body that had failed her?
Monday, July 26, 1999, is the day that still haunts me. It was the day I was told my mother was dying. The doctor was right; she didn’t make it to the weekend. My mother, the strong willed woman that she was, stayed with us until her mother was able to come and say goodbye. My grandmother and uncle still lived in New York, in the Bronx to be exact. The same city that my mother grew up in, the city that she met and married my father in. It wouldn’t be the city that she would leave this world in.
My grandmother and uncle arrived in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday, July 28, 1999. They sat for a while and stayed with my mother. They said their goodbyes before they left as well as did my brother at one in the morning when my father forced him to go home, get a shower and some sleep. That would be the early morning of Thursday, July 29, 1999. Though it was a blur, I believe I left some time in the afternoon of that Wednesday day, saying what would be my final goodbye to my mother.
I went to bed and would only be awoken by voices. Once again, I opened a door, this one to my parents’ room where I had been sleeping, and walked the plush carpet floor of the hallway till I reached the living room where my dad, grandmother and uncle had gathered. I knew, the moment I saw my dad who had left earlier that night for his usual overnight shift at work, I knew in that moment that she was gone. The world as I knew it, the one with my mother in it, was over.
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