the prayer after the fall. . .

by bam

my mama and papa, a long long time ago…

it was the call you pray you never, ever get: early morning. “police and paramedics are already there.” little else known.

except that it was my mom. and she’d taken a terrible fall, a nightmare of a fall. police had broken in the front door when they saw her lying, crumpled, unresponsive, at the bottom of the stairs. a spotted trail of blood had followed her down the last eight of 14 stairs, around the landing, and onto the slate floor of the front hall, where it had pooled. 

as the pieces started to fall into place, one theory was replaced by another, and what we knew was that it was a fall from the top of the steep hardwood stairs to the hall down below. she’d been lying there almost 12 hours. 

and i was some 200 miles away, driving 70 miles per hour, suddenly fielding phone calls to and from brothers scattered across the country, detroit, california, maine, and the brother whose car was following the ambulance to the emergency room where so much of our family’s life has unfolded: death, birth, broken arms and legs and umpteen stitches, hours-long surgeries and outpatient, too, along with a few godawful diagnoses.

my mother’s most fervent prayer since a car accident two aprils ago has been “to go home.” and home to my mother is heaven. she desperately doesn’t want to be alive anymore. finds little joy in the everyday. except for the birds. and irish whiskey on the rocks, with plenty of water, at 5 p.m. sharp (or 4 if nobody’s looking). and as she said to me in a whisper from her ICU bedside the other day, “to be honest, i wish i’d gone” (meaning not waken up after the fall). “but not that way, i guess” (meaning not alone, in the dark, at the bottom of the stairs, when she thought she’d been headed into the shower, to climb into bed, for another restless night of not much sleeping). 

my mother, who is as pragmatic and plainspoken as the day is long, wasted little time in realizing “i might never be allowed to live alone again.” a dawning followed quickly by “can you take me right now to westmoreland,” which is not quite the name of the place where she’s been on a waiting list for independent living since two aprils ago, and at least four times has told them “i’m not ready” when they’ve called her with an available apartment.

she’s still not ready. not really. 

but my mother’s face and scalp and arms and legs are the color of eggplant right now. the bruising so intense it’s long past purple and deep into inky indigo. somewhere between aubergine and midnight. and that’s only what’s broken on the outside. ribs, and vertebrae, and a bone on her face, they’re broken too. 

i was lying in bed the other night, the night before we moved my mother to rehab, tallying the things my mother will miss after 60 years in the house where we all grew up, the house she would not leave because of its tall oaks, and its sunsets out the kitchen window, and the birds and the deer and the pair of ducks who waddled under the fence each and every spring. 

after all these years of knowing ours was the house at the first bend on the winding dead-end street, across from the green pond and the woods where i grew up, across from the country club where my mother for years would strap on skis after any snowfall and glide for miles across snowy greens and tees and sand traps, i am bumping into brain hiccups any time i try to wrap my head around the brand-new notion that 707 will no longer be. or no longer be ours anyway, no longer the polestar to our family chronicles. 

for now, my mother is miles away from that old house. and she’s never going back. says she doesn’t think she could bear to say one last goodbye. so we will shutter it, the five of us who know that house inside and out, who know which upstairs window was the one a brother climbed in one night too late past curfew, the sliding door where another brother was showing off his brand new BB gun and PING! the glass was shattered, the arbor of oaks under which i and my beloved were married. 

this is not the way my mama––or any of us––wanted her story to end. 

but we’ve soldiered on before. she has always taught us how. she’s not one to buckle under. 

she’s been widowed 42 years; buried a husband, and a tiny baby granddaughter atop her husband’s grave; mothered five children, each of whom has had twists and turns and upside downs. she’s had cancers of her own. 

and till now, she has not crumpled. 

even now, her faith has barely flagged. but she looks up at me, through her swollen ink-black eyes, and asks, “barbie, why won’t God take me?” 

and how can i answer that, other than to say, “mama, we don’t know. we just don’t know.”

and so i rub her back where the terrible aching is, and we find her favorite cowboy channel, and i pray and i pray. don’t think me wrong to echo my mama’s prayer. i pray too, dear God, please take her home. she wants so very, very deeply to be there…

i’m transfixed by that photo above. i stare into my mama’s long-ago glimmer. i miss them both, so deeply.

today my only questions are ones without answers…