Till Our Last Breath
Bryn Mawr, Pa
May, 1998
My mother was dying of cancer. She probably only
weighed 85 pounds. We all knew we didn’t have much time left, maybe a couple of
days but no more than a week. And so we
spent our days around her bed, telling stories, remembering family moments and
trying to suck in every last opportunity to say what we had to say before it
was too late.
We were
approaching Mother’s Day. So there were
lots of cards from my father, siblings, grandchildren, nieces, nephews,
neighbors and a lifetime of friends. These lifelong
friends were coming and going to say their goodbyes to my mother. Sometimes there would be three or four of
them. Some were feeble and there were
not enough seats for them. And as they
left the room, I realized that not only were many of these old friends saying
goodbye to her, it was probably the last time I would see then as well. So I wanted to take care of them.
I brought
in a few chairs from the other room. And
then I added a card table or two for their drinks. And I added a box of
tissues. It was a little junky
looking, but now people could now visit in some comfort.
“Get
all this junk out of here”, my mother said demandingly.
“What,”
I said, just as I was positioning myself squarely in one of the seats I had
just brought in.
“The
room looks like a lobby. I don’t like
the feng shui. Get all this furniture out of here.”
I
tried to explain to her that I didn’t put it all here for appearance. Her visitors needed a place to sit. And “besides”, I told her, “You have bigger
issues right now than the feng shui of your bedroom.” I reminded her that she was dying.
“I
don’t care; I don’t like it. It’s my
room. Get this stuff out of my bedroom.”
This
woman could exhaust me. So I leaned
forward, looked right at her and asked, “When are you going to stop bossing me
around.” And then I sat back in my
chair.
She
got up on her boney elbows, using all the strength she could muster in her sick
condition. She looked right at me
and as clear and as confident as she was in her prime, she said to me, “When
am I going to stop bossing you around?
I’ll tell you when. When the
first one of us takes her last breathe.”
And then she lay down again, smugly and proud of her comeback.
I got
up, laughed, and moved the furniture back to the other room.
