Illumination

This is a true story.

My mother died suddenly when she was 51.

I got the call at dawn and somehow pulled myself together enough to borrow my friend's car and make it up to the city before noon. Because I have the dubious talent of being able to keep my head under pressure, only falling apart after the crisis is over, I was given the job of finding a mortician, picking out a coffin, and buying a grave. This done, I found myself alone in her room standing at the foot of the bed where she had died the night before.

The last time I had seen her was just a week before, at a wedding. Although I only lived 140 miles away, I would come up to Chicago only two or three times a year and didn't see her very much anymore. The wedding the week before had been fun enough, but I hadn't seen much of her there because as always, she was the vivacious life of the party and in much greater demand than I, the distant cousin. But I figured that I would see her after the wedding, since I would be spending the night on her couch.

As the reception wore down and the last dance was called, she suddenly came up to were I was sitting in a sulk and said “Let's dance”.

It was a slow dance. I had a bad habit then of staring at my feet when I danced, perhaps because I wondered where they were going to go next. But she quickly put me to rights. “Don't look at your feet. Look at me!”

Embarrassed, I looked at her. And she looked back at me in a way that made me feel a bit uncomfortable, intently staring into my eyes as though she were trying to chart them. Her eyes were a bit bloodshot and red rimmed, and my impression was that this was not from drink. As she continued to gaze at me, I decided to try to break the spell.

“Are you all right? You look a little....”
“I'm all right. I'm just tired. I'm very very tired.”
“When was the last time you had blood work done?”
“Um, about eight months ago.”
“Eight months?!”

My mother had a chronic blood clotting problem and had had it for many years, sometimes getting phlebitis in her leg so severe that amputation would be discussed. A few years earlier I have been called home from grad school in Connecticut because she had developed a blood clot in her lung and the prognosis wasn't good. She survived it and her doctor had put her on a very powerful blood thinner that she was to take for the rest of her life.

“You may eventually die from being hit by a truck, but as long as you take this stuff you will never die of a blood clot. Provided that you have your blood closely monitored every six weeks to adjust the dosage.”

She had be doing this for several years, religiously I thought, and sometimes the increases or decreases in the medication were radical. Eight months without a test was very dangerous.

I asked her why she hadn't been getting the tests.

“Well, you know, M won't bother taking me to the hospital for them.”

(M was the first initial of her husband's name, which I won't print here even though he's been dead for quite a while. I still find it hard to speak his name).

That was typical of her husband, an abusive drunk. But even though her hospital was some distance away and in a bad West Side neighborhood, M was really no excuse when she could just have taken a taxi.

“Look. I will call in sick to the classes I'm teaching and stay an extra day and take you personally.”
“No.”
“I'm not asking your permission.”
“I promise I'll go to the doctor by taxi the day after tomorrow. I'll make the appointment tomorrow and take a taxi the next day. I promise. I really will.”

I was skeptical, but she had always kept her word with me in the past, so I dropped it. And now I was standing at the foot of her deathbed, where according to her doctor she had died of a pulmonary thrombosis – a blood clot in her lung.

What was the real reason she had skipped her tests?

I could well see M refusing one way or another to take her. He was a horrible man and it was a horrible marriage. But she was very strong and seemed tough enough to endure it all, although she was certainly not thriving. Sometimes she would say “He's really wearing me down.” This was an interesting thing for her to say, since she was a woman who had taught herself not to take men very seriously (since really, she had never been with a serious man). Once I was present when a friend of hers tearfully came to her after breaking up with a boyfriend.

“You're getting all upset......over a MAN?!” my mother had said, as she poured out the scotch.

I knew that my mother did sometimes get depressed, and deeply. But her personal remedy for it was to throw herself headlong into some activity, preferably by making the people around her happy, preferably by partying hard. And she would end up lifting everyone's spirits. But then, she had some interesting advantages.

“My sister", said my uncle once, "simply does not give a shit about what anyone else thinks of her”.  One would have to know her extremely well to know whether she was actually depressed or not.

M had been wearing her down. So my brother and I encouraged her to dump him, good sons that we sometimes were. When I had heard ten months earlier that she had opened a secret bank account and was socking away money for her escape, my heart filled with joy.

But a couple of months later, I heard that M had stumbled across the account and had angrily demanded that his name be put on it too. Why she didn't just close it I did not know, but she did add his name.

Then six months ago, one night at her kitchen table maybe eight paces from where I was standing at the foot of her deathbed, I had a disturbing evening with her. This had been the last time I had seen her before the wedding last week.

We were up late following our old custom of talking and drinking lots of cups of milky tea. Her husband had already passed out from his custom of drinking a dozen tall boys every night and I could hear him snoring behind the door. We were chatting happily when suddenly she got very serious.

“Here, I want you to do me a couple of favors.”
“Sure. Of course. Whatever you want. What do you need?”

Thinking about it now at the foot of that bed, I realized that she had been staring intently into my eyes that night in exactly the same way she had at the wedding dance.

“Okay. First thing is that I am going to sign you onto my bank account.”
“Why? And isn't M already on it?”
“Yeah, he is. But I want you on it. Just in case something happens. And should something happen, I want you to promise something. I want you to promise that when you come up to Chicago, I want you to go directly to the bank before you do anything else and clean out that account. I want you to get there before M does. And then I want you to take the money and split it between yourself and your two brothers.”
“Wait. What? Why?”
“Because I want you to.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a bank signature form.

“Sign this. And then promise me that you will do exactly what I say.”
“Well, um, all right. But I'm sure that none of this will be necessary.”
“Good. The second thing is that I am making you the sole beneficiary for my insurance policy from work. It's a very small policy, but I want you to divide the money between yourself and your brothers. You're the only one I can trust to do this. And also promise that whatever M does or says or what anyone else says, you won't give M a penny of it.”
“Wait now. What is this? Are you sick or dying or something and not telling me? What's going on here?”
“No, not at all. I'm fine. But just do it.”
“All right.”
“Finally, if something happens, I want you to do one more thing. I want you to get into this house, even if you have to break a window, and I want you to remove all of my personal possessions. I'm talking about mementos from before I met M, photos, things I inherited from my parents and stuff like that.”
“You want me to break in and steal your stuff?”
“You won't be stealing it. I'm giving it to you. Just make sure --- and I mean absolutely sure --- that you come and get it if anything happens.”

I agreed and tried to sort of laugh it off at the time. She seemed relieved and we poured out some more tea and talked about other things.

Had my mother had a premonition of her death? This was by no means unknown on her side of the family. Shake the shutters a bit and all kinds of creepy stories would fall out. But had she seen her death coming six months ago?

She hadn't had a blood test for eight months.

But then. But then. Ten months ago, eight months ago, six months ago, a week ago....I'm very very tired....Look at me!

Suddenly, at the foot of her deathbed, with traces of her blood on the sheets, to my total shame and horror, the pieces...snapped...into....place.