Chapter 13

We got to the hospital and spoke with the check-in nurse.  She seemed to think mom should see a doctor.  Thank God.  So she admitted my mother and asked us to have a seat in the waiting room.  My mother wouldn’t sit.  She kept looking at the pictures on the wall, moving quickly from one painting to the next.   We were looking at a serene, yellow meadow and she said that it was a picture of Phil.  That was the color Phil was when he died.  My mother had been in the hospital room with Phil when he passed away.  I’m told Phil did not go easy into that goodnight.  And my mother watched him suffer into death.  She watched as his organs failed one by one.  She watched him turn yellow as his liver died.  She watched him grasp for each breath until his last.  She is now trapped with that image for the rest of her life and on this day she cannot seem to escape it.  We were finally taken to a hospital room in the emergency center.  Someone came in and began asking my mother questions.  My mom answered her questions and then she left the room, leaving my mom alone with Vicki and me.  Suddenly, my mother’s entire demeanor changed and she became lucid for the first time in my adult life.  “Why aren’t I normal?” she asked me, looking into my eyes as if I had the answer.  “I just don’t want to be a burden to you.”  At these words I let out every emotion I ever had about my mother and just cried.  It was finally clear to me that my mother was never capable of choosing to leave Phil.  She needed him for survival.  She was sick and couldn’t ever take care of herself, let alone her child.  I felt all my hatred for her leave my body as if it had been possessed all these years with an evil spirit.  Then panic set in.  What if she was lucid when the doctor came in?  Then they wouldn’t keep her.  Then as if someone flipped a switch, she jumped up and lunged for the door screaming she needed to go see Phil.  The hospital staff heard the commotion and came in to help hold her down.  Finally, they had to shoot her with a sedative and down she went.  She wouldn’t wake again until the next morning.