The Things You Will Do

You will see your mother’s number calling and a strange cardboard voice will strike your ear with She’s passed, and you’ll hang onto your mind, save it from falling into dead air, fingers squeezing the life out of the phone, the connection to your mother forever lost, knowing your vigil has finally ended after months of broken hours at her metal bed in strange rooms, after cross-country flights, speaking the odd dialect of vitals and ends and means, and the fragile thread you spun of cheery small talk through the phone across continents and oceans will snap, and the candles lit for her in musty cathedrals in cities on three continents—tiny flames of hope pushing back the darkness—will burn down to nothing, and on that day in the sunshine, when you realize she’s gone, and daffodils smile from every sidewalk flowerbed, and you tell yourself she is finally at peace as you spring across the sunny street, dodging taxis amid a shower of pink cherry blossoms, and for those first sterling minutes, you will bask in the honking horns, the flitting sparrows, the jackhammers, the pedestrians hurrying into crowded crosswalks, but at night, her winces from pain will punch at your dreams, and the echo of her wheezes will claw you awake, your mind’s eye seeing her anguish as she gasps for the air her body could no longer find, and you will feel her absolute terror as you imagine a strange caregiver spending those last moments with her—the one with the cardboard voice, frozen at her bedside, hands tied by the DNR—while you are already at work on the other side of the country, and it will be impossible to shut your eyes to it, the way you left her there.