a beginning

Afterward it seemed we all knew she was dying except my father and—though she claimed otherwise—it was perhaps an obvious sort of secret we helped her shield him from until the end. It was not so sad as it sounds. She knew he loved her. Within hours of her fall, and while he was still gone gathering magic foods and sorcerer’s appliances (“Is all this a game?” she asked wearily, “all this eating and going?”), she miraculously got her strength back and my brother and I sat with her and swapped tales. She wanted to sit in the chair and we helped her there, then made the bed up with fresh linen. (You will excuse me for keeping this language so simple. This is a simple story.)

We moved the bed out and swept under it, surprised at the accumulated dust, shadowy tufts shifting in the breeze of the broom, soft as angora, the air glinting with motes of dander stirred up into the sunlight.

Under the bed a nest of extension cords thrust into one another like snakes copulating. They fed a network of radios and lamps, a vaporizer and a very old General Electric alarm clock, its yellowed plastic face almost opaque from years of sunlight and cigarette smoke.

“Jesus, you’re lucky you haven’t killed yourself sleeping above this mess,” my brother said. He was always the imp who made her laugh.

I think how she laughed fooled him into thinking there was more time. So when I called him the next day to say to hurry he couldn’t completely believe me. Though he came back to the house soon, it wasn’t soon enough.

If he was the jester, I was the priest. The next day when I woke, I knew she was dying. I do not know how I knew, I did not know how to die. It was mid-morning already. We had all slept late, my father in the chair next to her. He went off to the shower when I came in. I sat at her bedside with a shiny metal bowl of warm water and a very white washcloth. The close-cropped halo of her head looked like a moon against the pillow, its secrets gone. Her breathing was halting and yet somehow not as difficult as it had been in other times. Simply uneasy. I sponged her arms and face at intervals, following some rhythm I sensed rather than knew. Sometimes I offered her chips of ice, placing them on her tongue like communion when she nodded that she was thirsty. She talked a great deal of the time but in a delirium which I could only sometimes understand. Sometimes she seemed to be telling herself what she saw, sometimes she seemed to be talking to her own dead parents. Sometimes she seemed to be talking the language of death. I also spoke, talking a great deal, telling her she had a great journey ahead of her and that we were there and my brother was on his way. My father moved in and out of the room, unable to stay. Sometimes he took her hand, sometimes he kissed her. He looked at me with an awful fright in his eyes and I took his own hand and tried to tell him. I had to make up the language of death for myself. He couldn’t hear me, he did not want to think I was correct about the end. He quite literally became a liminal figure, a shadow at the doorway, alone in a slow frenzy. It was a time when the husband gave way to the priest, my father to the son I had become. I was sorry that he could not stay. It was very peaceful really, watching her consummate her journey. I washed her arms and face, touched the fringe of hair. She began to talk about how she had to go soon. At first I was certain that she meant she would leave us and go to her death but then I began to think (crazily I think now) that she wanted to use the toilet. It was mad to think this, she was so weak she had begun to seem transparent. Yet I think because my father had come home the previous day with a portable toilet, a chrome tripod with a canvas canopy and a plastic sack for waste, I may briefly have thought this sorcery might work. In truth I knew it was crazy but even so I tried to help her sit up and swing her legs out so she could sit on the thing. In the course of helping her up, my arms under her arms, she in my arms, she said she had to go again and I knew I had been right at the first. She began to die now. She looked at me, softly, sweetly, took a long breath then closed her eyes. I told her my father was there and began calling frantically to him. I cannot recall whether he was in the room at her last breath. I sealed her closed eyes with my finger, smoothed her cheek. She was already gone. The air smelled sweet.

When my brother arrived he did not panic. He could feel the peace of her death in the room. It was like the blooming of a flower. (This is a simple story.) He touched her face, kissed her. My father was searching for something in the cabinets in the hallway, his voice keening low from time to time and mournful. We heard the drawers of the cabinets open and shut.We were waiting for the undertaker. My brother looked at me. “I can still feel her here,” he said. I nodded and said, “She is still here.” We were talking about the peace, though probably aware of the belief that the souls of the dead linger for awhile at the place of their death. My father heard us say this and rushed back in the room.

“Do you think she is?” he said. He had mistaken what we said. He thought it had not happened as it did. In his hand he had a silver mirror, a clamshell shaped round encrusted with faux pearls and dark stones. He wanted us to use the mirror to check for her breath. It was a simple story, very Shakespearean. He had torn a compact in half, breaking the clamshell mirror off the hinges. It was something she had treasured, putting it away in a drawer full of linens. He could not believe she could die. (Perhaps he only believed when he accomplished that feat himself some two years after, unable to live without her.)

The day before, after my brother had left, my mother sat a while more in the chair, then asked me whether there was a heaven.

“I don't know,” I said. It was important to tell the truth. “What do you think?”

“I don't know either,” she said. She looked into my eyes and said very simply, “I think about it a lot.”

“I think there is,” I said, “the world is too beautiful a place for there not to be.”

“I will let you know if I can,” she said.

Her first born, I helped her die.