Every person on the planet has a story. And just like people are different
so are their stories. Sometimes people can live the same event and have
completely different stories to tell. Most people's stories are simply
single events. One occurrence that is somehow remembered as special and
has ever since defined a part of that person. Humans do not seem to think
of their lives as a whole very often. We tend to break things down into
more manageable parts. We too often ignore the more miniscule parts and
toss them aside as necessary, yet temporary events. One may well remember
that evening on the lake with one's grandparent down to the smell of the
water and the exact color of the sunset. Yet somehow, the trip to the lake
and even complete weeks after is completely forgotten. If not forgotten,
then at least pushed so far back that it is invisible to the conscious
mind. It is hard for someone to remember things that are not necessary for
day to day life. The human brain is not designed for such function. But
there are those for whom memories are necessary for everyday living.
Perhaps because the memories are all they have. Maybe they remember in
order to tell others so as the stories are not lost. But details do fade
and even change with time. One's youth is often too far-gone to completely
recall the exact events. But sometimes a person is reminded so often of
those events that they can remember exact details from decades earlier.
And sometimes a person is reminded because single events create their life
and their daily tasks are simply bridges between memories.
But perhaps the saddest aspect of memories is that even though we can share them with as many people as we like, these people were not there. They can not possibly grasp the emotions that went into the events. Very rarely are we afforded the luxury of having any one person in our lives that has had the same experiences we have had at the exact moment we did. My mother was one of those people who lived life through stepping-stones. She relished every moment of every day, but there was always something in her presence that made her appear discontent. No matter how happy she looked, how crowded the room was, or how much she accomplished, her eyes looked sad, alone, and incomplete. When I was a young boy I did not notice this, she would not have allowed it. I had never even seen her cry until I was twenty-five, and that was by accident. She was a fortress when it came to emotions. She rarely lost her temper and never showed her sadness. But her patience was endless and her love as rare as the story of her life. Unfortunately I would not learn her story until shortly before she died. Sadder still, I would find that my own story was intertwined with hers more so than that of an average son. When I finally listened to the story of her life, I was unexpectedly being told the story of my own. I learned that sometimes the very foundations of our lives are lies, hard lies that hurt. But surprisingly I learned also that those lies may be hiding truths that in the beginning may hurt just as much but in the end bring fulfillment and completeness.
I now tell the story as I was exposed to it. I tell it now in this way because it is still new in my mind and I can not possibly expect myself to remember a life that was not my own. I tell it so that others may know what I know now and what my mother wanted the world to know and yet could never share.
Baltimore, Maryland – October 16, 2045
Autumn. A beautiful time of year. The leaves on the trees practically glow. They appear to have captured the sun and in it's futile attempt to escape, allows the light to penetrate through every layer of tissue. At this point in the season, some leaves have given in and have turned brown and brittle, casualties of the sun's fury. And yet, there are still those who refuse to give up their own color. That resilient green bounces lively in the wind. Popping in and out from between the oranges and reds. It is these singular leaves to which my attention is drawn as I drive down the unmarked two-lane road toward my mother's house. It is at this moment that their singular drive to stay vibrant and alive means the most to me. I glanced over at my wife in the passenger's seat. Asleep, her head tilted down and her chin almost on her shoulder. Her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She always pulls her hair back when she is nervous or worried. It is her physical way of pushing all the unimportant things away, like hairstyles, and focusing on what's at hand. Watching her in this peaceful state I realized that what was happening may have been having more of an affect on her than on me. Yet she would never let me know. She has a way of ignoring all her own needs when she thinks someone else may need her attention. If she had never given me anything else in life, she had always given me her shoulder when I had needed it.
I glanced back through the rear view mirror at my daughter. She too was asleep. Her tiny head of auburn curls pressed against the side of the car seat. Only two years old and already making her way through this world. I have never known a child that was so caring and giving. She has a way of knowing when someone is hurting and goes to them instinctually. I can never forget seeing the sadness in her eyes when she toddled up to me in the yard with a dying sparrow clutched to her chest. I never thought a child so young could understand another's pain and want to help the way she did. I can also never forget the pain in those same blue eyes when that sparrow died and I had to take it away. She didn't know how to make it better and her heart ached knowing she could do nothing.
And now here I was, with two of the most gentle creatures ever placed on this earth, heading towards yet another. I had been blessed to live a life with these courageous women, and now one was about to be taken from me. I had gotten the call three days ago at our home in Chicago from my mother's home nurse letting me know that the time was near. The cancer was winning, and my mother needed me. It was a call I never thought I would get. No matter how bad the disease had gotten, the eternal child in me thought that the invincible soul that was my mother would never give in, would never leave me. But for all her fighting, the cancer was beating her. At this moment, driving in silence, it hadn't occurred to me that this was her last fight. Her last, but by no means her hardest. As I would soon learn, the battle with cancer was child's play compared to the battles of her life.
Clarissa, my mother's homely, middle-aged home nurse was waiting at the door when we pulled up the gravel drive towards my mother's house. Every time I came home, it was like I was transported back in time. I could see my mother working in the front flower bed and my grandmother sitting in the old rocking chair on the front porch as I purposefully made my way down the drive away from the yellow school bus that carried me from school each afternoon. Driving under the tall oaks that bent their branches lovingly over the gravel path still calms me. The arches of their branches beckoning me in further, the echoes of their rustling leaves calling me home, telling me I am safe, and reassuring me that someone that loves me awaits just a few yards ahead.
"I'm glad you made it safe, she's been worried," Clarissa called from the porch. Even though she lived with my mother now, she wore her white uniform shirt and skirt everyday. Her brown, ever-so-slightly-gray hair was always pulled neatly back into a bun and her large framed glasses were perched stately on her nose.
"Sorry. We had a lot of stuff to do before we left. I would have called but everything was so hurried," I answered through the car window. I turned to Karen beside me and eased her from her sleep. As she began to sit up and unbuckle her seatbelt I got out of the car and went to the trunk to start unloading our luggage.
"Now Michael, you let me get those," Clarissa fussed, making her way toward the car. "You go see your mama and I'll tend to Karen and the baby."
"Clarissa, you tend to everything anymore. Let me at least take the luggage upstairs. It won't take that long to get to Mom."
"Now you know your mother. She's got a sixth sense when it comes to you. Her room may be upstairs and on the other side of the house, but she knows you're here and she won't rest until she sees that you're safe and healthy. So just get yourself up there straight away before she tries to get her fool self down here."
I raised my hands in mock defeat, turned to Karen and winked, just to see her smile, and then turned toward the house and to my mother. The truth be told I wanted to take the luggage in because I thought it would give me just a few more minutes to prepare myself. Maybe I thought that if I waited long enough I would finally wake up from this nightmare. But I knew for certain that the longer I waited, the less time I would have to spend with her, and that hurt even more.
Stepping into the foyer, for the first time in my life I felt like a stranger in my own home. The shiny hardwood floors felt foreign beneath my feet. Looking into the study on my right I could see my mother, years earlier, typing furiously at her computer, rushing to make the deadline for her research paper. To the left I could see my grandmother, sitting in the family room in front of a roaring fire, watching the television. Memories that were so vivid, but so fleeting. In their place came the present, and it was an odd sensation. Nothing like the warmth I had felt just moments earlier coming down the drive. This was the sense of reality. The cold loneliness of not knowing what lay ahead but still pushing onward. And so I did push on. Up the stairs that stretched before me and towards my mother's room.
I had always loved her bedroom. It was in the back corner of the house and untrue to its farmhouse tradition, had large plate windows down both outside walls. The room itself was L-shaped the bed positioned at the inside corner of the "L", facing the windows. The windows themselves looked out on the pond behind the house and the lines of trees that corralled it. The most spectacular sunsets could be seen from my mother's bedroom and for that matter the best sunrises as well, such was the situation of the house. I stepped quietly into the room, my weight causing the mahogany floorboards beneath me to creak.
"Michael, don't be shy. What have I told you? You always enter a room like you were meant to be there, no matter if you should or not."
My mother's voice called to me like a whip. She had a way of always knowing what I was up to. She could scold with her voice better than she could have done with her fist. Even now, at this point in her life, though weak, her voice was determined and firm.
"Sorry, Kit. Thought that maybe you were asleep. I didn't mean to startle you."
"You didn't startle me. I haven't been surprised by anything in years," she claimed matter-of-factly.
"How are you feeling?" I asked cautiously, and found out quickly, with reason.
"How the hell do you think I feel? I'm dying. I feel like…"
"Kit! I get it. You feel bad," I interrupted.
"Oh, kids. You always did hate it when I cursed. I always felt like I was the child when you would scold me," she giggled softly, remembering.
"Yeah, well, you got scolded a lot." I still had not completely turned towards her. I chose to stare out the windows at the water, contemplating the loons as they gently floated across.
"Come here Michael. I know you don't want to see me like this, but I need to see you."
I dropped my head, pained by the thought that any time she looked at me could be her last. I walked to the edge of the bed, my head still down, now focusing on the white down comforter that draped across her legs. Suddenly I remembered that she always had a white down comforter on her bed. She would buy new ones through the years, the decorative stitching may have varied, but they would always be white linen stuffed with down.
"You look horrible. You're losing weight again, aren't you? I swear you worry too much. You have too much of your grandmother in you, that's what it is. That woman worried over everything. God bless her, she would be a wreck right now if she were here."
"Yeah, well, neither one of us could stand it when you got sick, even if it was a cold. You hardly ever got sick and when you would it felt like…well, it felt wrong," I said, still counting the threads in the comforter.
"Well, she was my Mom and you are my son. Your mother and your children are always the first and sometimes the only people who really worry when you are ill. You'll learn that with Alexa. When Karen is busy taking care of you, it will be Alexa walking the floor. That is if she doesn't already."
"She's only two. She doesn't really understand. But yeah, she's a worrier already. She can't stand to see anyone in pain. She just doesn't understand how or why. But she notices things."
"Well, it's genetic apparently. Where are they anyway, Karen and Alexa?"
"I left them to Clarissa to unload the car and get settled. They should be in any minute."
"What a shame I won't see her grow up," she said, suddenly lamenting. "I would have loved to see her off to the Prom and be there when you give her away to some handsome young man who has swept her off her feet."
"Oh don't worry. You won't miss that because I'm not giving her away. I don't care how far she's been swept. She's mine and that's that," I joked, trying to lighten the mood.
"You only think she's yours. Someday her prince will find her. And no matter what you do to keep them apart, they will be together somehow…"she trailed off. I looked up to see her staring off at something beyond the landscape, her brow knitted with distraction. I suddenly felt that she was not speaking to me, but more like through me, to someone else in some distant place.
"Hey you two," Karen piped as she entered the room. "How's my favorite mother-in-law?"
Mom came back from her thoughts, a smile beaming across her face, her porcelain skin bending to its call, but even at sixty-eight years old, hardly wrinkling. Karen slipped in next to me, bent over and brushed her lips against my mother's cheek and then smoothed back her auburn hair with a gentle hand. My mother's crystal blue eyes shimmered at this excited attention.
"I can't believe how good you look Mother Kit. Not one gray hair. It's unnatural. Tell me the truth, Clarissa colors your hair for you doesn't she? Go on, you can tell me," Karen teased, gently nudging Mom with the back of her arm as she nestled in beside her on the bed.
"Oh, Karen, stop it," my mother waved her hand slightly, physically brushing off Karen's teasing. "Where's that baby? I haven't seen her in months."
"She's asleep in the other room. It was a long trip for a little thing like her. Too much excitement. I'm sure she'll wake up in a little while. In the mean time I think I'm going to go down and get some tea. How about you two?"
"I'm fine dear. You go on ahead," my mother smiled weakly, the excitement of the visit already draining her.
"Me, too. I'll just sit with Kit for a while," I said, trying to force a grin on Karen's behalf.
It was hard to think that after losing her own mother at just a young age, only six years old, that now Karen would be losing the only other woman she had ever been close to.
"Okay, I'll be back in a minute," Karen said as she left the room.
"I don't think you could have found a kinder woman on the planet than her," my mother said softly as Karen's footsteps disappeared down the hall.
"She's one in a million. I still feel insecure about our age difference sometimes though. Sometimes I look at her and all I think is 'What in the world is a woman of twenty-eight doing with a forty-one year old husband.' Then I start worrying about being this old and having a two- year old daughter. God, when she's eighteen, I'll be fifty-nine. That scares the hell out of me."
"Well, sometimes it's not how long we are with someone, or even who exactly that someone is, that matters. What counts is that we have, is even for a short time, a person that we can call our own. Someone so close to us that they are part of our souls. That's what counts," my mother spoke as if setting down prophecy. But then again, she always had.
She had a mysterious aura surrounding her. She could hand out advice to anyone with the spirit that she had lived through the same things as they had and more, yet I couldn't remember anything out of the ordinary in her life. All I could remember was a work-at-home mother that sent me off to school each morning and was waiting on the porch for me in the afternoon. She occasionally left for a few weeks on research trips, conventions, or educational talks, but mostly she studied from books and made her observations on the wildlife living on our property, all 325 acres of it. I don't know how she did it, but in between caring for my grandmother and myself my mother had become one of the top researchers in the field of wildlife biology. In less than twenty years she had inventoried and categorized every living creature in the woods and field surrounding out home. She had found innovative ways of tagging and marking some of the most elusive animals and through her papers and speeches had began a kind of revolution in the art of animal tracking and population census. She was, in her own way, a pioneer of science.
Yet, for all her scientific knowledge and love of wildlife, I had still managed to slip through the cracks to become a journalist. I love nature, always have, and how could I not, but writing was a passion. After college I landed a job at a small local paper, working the small town circuit here in Maryland. I worked there for ten years, scraping out a living until one day a guy from the New York Times walked in and offered me a job, saying he had read my work, and felt good about taking a chance on me. I jumped at the chance, packed my bags, and left Maryland, and my mother, behind. Five years later I left the hectic life of New York, bored with my job, which had become little more than mailroom/secretary position with very little writing, and the sterile confines of the city. I took a job with a man who was looking for someone to follow him around the Amazon Basin, writing his memoirs. This man as it turned out, was a fifty-five year old divorcee, looking for adventure, but ended up only finding repeated cases of food poisoning and thousands upon thousand of mosquito bites. Somehow though, I managed to turn his two-year stumble through the bush into something he was actually proud to have lived through. It wasn't quite fiction, I mean it was about him, he really did spend two years in the Amazon, and yes he really did come face to face with a good number of dangerous, even venomous, creatures, but the rest was mostly prose.
I made my way back to the States after our excursion and for some reason made Chicago home. I rented a less than roomy apartment that dripped when it rained and housed numerous small mammals when it snowed, but it was cheap. I had never imagined that at thirty-eight I would be so close to poverty and without a decent job. I called my mother everyday, but never let her know what was really going on, though at times I thought she did. She always had a way of calling and asking me if I needed money or telling me she was wiring some anyway, just when I needed it most. I had been back in the States for six months when some buddies took me out to a club for my birthday. It was a small establishment; I probably never would have gone in by myself, since I rarely drank and was actually a little intimidated by the nightlife of the city. We had sat around for an hour or so talking and laughing when I saw her walk in. She was strikingly beautiful. I could tell that she was much younger than I was, she entered between two other young women, and the trio giggled and nudged each other all the way to the bar. My every instinct told me to go up to her and introduce myself. But the rational part of my brain butted in, warning me that it had been at least four years since my last date and not many twenty- something's would go for a man with no money, no real job, who was pushing twice her age.
But just as the thought entered my mind, the strangest thing happened – she looked up from the bar and looked me straight in the eye. She didn't blink, didn't blush, and didn't falter. I felt all of a sudden that she had walked in this very night looking for me. Not looking for a date, or a one-night stand, but me. My heart almost stopped. After a few beats, I got up from the table, not one word to my mates, and walked straight up to her and asked her to dance. She accepted and that's how it started. After that night we hardly left each other's side. She moved in with me three weeks later, together we could afford a larger, drier apartment, and within four months, we were married. Unfortunately for my mother, we were married at the courthouse, no big ceremony, just Karen's parents and my mother and Clarissa there to witness and give us their blessing.
Meeting and marrying Karen was the closest thing to a miracle I have ever experienced. After I met her, I got an offer by a publisher friend-of- a-friend who had read the memoirs of a certain aged lunatic, for whatever reason, and decided that maybe I should try my hand at writing novels. I took him up on the idea, and three months later handed in my first transcript. And as inexplicably as why he read the memoirs, he decided to publish it. It wasn't a huge success, but it offered me the opportunity to write and publish another, which led to another, and yet another. At some point, I was labeled one of the best new writers of the decade, at made it on the New York Times best-seller list. It was actually the first time my name was seriously printed in a paper for which I wrote for ten years. Karen and I celebrated my big hit along with the birth of our new daughter, Alexa. Turning thirty-nine it seemed wasn't going to be such a bad thing after all.
It wasn't until Alexa's first birthday party that I found out that something was wrong with my mother. Apparently something had been wrong for a long time. She had been diagnosed with lymphoma three weeks prior to the party and was scheduled to begin treatment the following day after flying back to Baltimore. I remember begging her to stay in Chicago for treatment, but she insisted that with her new home health nurse she would be fine and did not want to be a burden. That night she took Alexa to sleep next to her, holding her close the entire night. The next morning she laid Alexa in her crib, called a cab and left for the airport without waking a soul. Either Karen or myself would travel to Baltimore at least once a month, sometimes with Alexa, to check up on her with our own eyes as she would deniably lie on the phone and I could tell that her nurse, Clarissa, was under strict orders not to reveal anything.
Here we were now, a year later, watching the strongest soul I had ever met, slowly fade away despite her smiles and struggling cheery demeanor. I looked at her now, staring off into the new night sky, her skin so pale, her once strong, athletic muscle depleted, looking half her normal size. Yet there was something inside of her that glowed. Strength uncommonly known that had the will to resist such a trespass as cancer. I had not suspected that this disease would overcome her as quickly as within a year.
I was started from my thoughts when I heard Karen coming down the hall, the sound of china clinking on a tray proceeding her footsteps. I knew instantly that she had disregarded our earlier testaments and was bringing us tea. Green tea to be exact. The same thing my mother had always drank when we were nervous or worried. It had become over the years, my only way of knowing when something was wrong with her, as she would never have told me outright.
"Okay you two," Karen announced brightly as she entered, " despite your earlier comments, I have brought you both tea." She placed the wooden tray on a large oak table in front of one of the windows and began pouring the hot liquid into the fragile china cups that had belonged to my grandmother.
"Well Kit, what do you say? Tea after all?" I asked raising a cup in her direction and watching her wave it away, her eyes slowly closing.
"Kit. That's so odd," Karen mused," You have to be the only man I know that calls his mother that.'
"I've always called her that," I said, suddenly realizing, after all these years, that it did sound strange. "I don't think I even know why I started calling her that."
"Because he did," I heard my mother say weakly.
"Who did?" I asked softly, noticing she was drifting off to sleep.
"He called me Kate when everyone else called me Katherine. But you were too young. The best you could do was 'Kit.' You were so much like him. Two of a kind. I wish you had known sooner."
"Known what?" I asked. But it was too late. She was asleep. My inquiries would have to wait until morning.
But perhaps the saddest aspect of memories is that even though we can share them with as many people as we like, these people were not there. They can not possibly grasp the emotions that went into the events. Very rarely are we afforded the luxury of having any one person in our lives that has had the same experiences we have had at the exact moment we did. My mother was one of those people who lived life through stepping-stones. She relished every moment of every day, but there was always something in her presence that made her appear discontent. No matter how happy she looked, how crowded the room was, or how much she accomplished, her eyes looked sad, alone, and incomplete. When I was a young boy I did not notice this, she would not have allowed it. I had never even seen her cry until I was twenty-five, and that was by accident. She was a fortress when it came to emotions. She rarely lost her temper and never showed her sadness. But her patience was endless and her love as rare as the story of her life. Unfortunately I would not learn her story until shortly before she died. Sadder still, I would find that my own story was intertwined with hers more so than that of an average son. When I finally listened to the story of her life, I was unexpectedly being told the story of my own. I learned that sometimes the very foundations of our lives are lies, hard lies that hurt. But surprisingly I learned also that those lies may be hiding truths that in the beginning may hurt just as much but in the end bring fulfillment and completeness.
I now tell the story as I was exposed to it. I tell it now in this way because it is still new in my mind and I can not possibly expect myself to remember a life that was not my own. I tell it so that others may know what I know now and what my mother wanted the world to know and yet could never share.
Baltimore, Maryland – October 16, 2045
Autumn. A beautiful time of year. The leaves on the trees practically glow. They appear to have captured the sun and in it's futile attempt to escape, allows the light to penetrate through every layer of tissue. At this point in the season, some leaves have given in and have turned brown and brittle, casualties of the sun's fury. And yet, there are still those who refuse to give up their own color. That resilient green bounces lively in the wind. Popping in and out from between the oranges and reds. It is these singular leaves to which my attention is drawn as I drive down the unmarked two-lane road toward my mother's house. It is at this moment that their singular drive to stay vibrant and alive means the most to me. I glanced over at my wife in the passenger's seat. Asleep, her head tilted down and her chin almost on her shoulder. Her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She always pulls her hair back when she is nervous or worried. It is her physical way of pushing all the unimportant things away, like hairstyles, and focusing on what's at hand. Watching her in this peaceful state I realized that what was happening may have been having more of an affect on her than on me. Yet she would never let me know. She has a way of ignoring all her own needs when she thinks someone else may need her attention. If she had never given me anything else in life, she had always given me her shoulder when I had needed it.
I glanced back through the rear view mirror at my daughter. She too was asleep. Her tiny head of auburn curls pressed against the side of the car seat. Only two years old and already making her way through this world. I have never known a child that was so caring and giving. She has a way of knowing when someone is hurting and goes to them instinctually. I can never forget seeing the sadness in her eyes when she toddled up to me in the yard with a dying sparrow clutched to her chest. I never thought a child so young could understand another's pain and want to help the way she did. I can also never forget the pain in those same blue eyes when that sparrow died and I had to take it away. She didn't know how to make it better and her heart ached knowing she could do nothing.
And now here I was, with two of the most gentle creatures ever placed on this earth, heading towards yet another. I had been blessed to live a life with these courageous women, and now one was about to be taken from me. I had gotten the call three days ago at our home in Chicago from my mother's home nurse letting me know that the time was near. The cancer was winning, and my mother needed me. It was a call I never thought I would get. No matter how bad the disease had gotten, the eternal child in me thought that the invincible soul that was my mother would never give in, would never leave me. But for all her fighting, the cancer was beating her. At this moment, driving in silence, it hadn't occurred to me that this was her last fight. Her last, but by no means her hardest. As I would soon learn, the battle with cancer was child's play compared to the battles of her life.
Clarissa, my mother's homely, middle-aged home nurse was waiting at the door when we pulled up the gravel drive towards my mother's house. Every time I came home, it was like I was transported back in time. I could see my mother working in the front flower bed and my grandmother sitting in the old rocking chair on the front porch as I purposefully made my way down the drive away from the yellow school bus that carried me from school each afternoon. Driving under the tall oaks that bent their branches lovingly over the gravel path still calms me. The arches of their branches beckoning me in further, the echoes of their rustling leaves calling me home, telling me I am safe, and reassuring me that someone that loves me awaits just a few yards ahead.
"I'm glad you made it safe, she's been worried," Clarissa called from the porch. Even though she lived with my mother now, she wore her white uniform shirt and skirt everyday. Her brown, ever-so-slightly-gray hair was always pulled neatly back into a bun and her large framed glasses were perched stately on her nose.
"Sorry. We had a lot of stuff to do before we left. I would have called but everything was so hurried," I answered through the car window. I turned to Karen beside me and eased her from her sleep. As she began to sit up and unbuckle her seatbelt I got out of the car and went to the trunk to start unloading our luggage.
"Now Michael, you let me get those," Clarissa fussed, making her way toward the car. "You go see your mama and I'll tend to Karen and the baby."
"Clarissa, you tend to everything anymore. Let me at least take the luggage upstairs. It won't take that long to get to Mom."
"Now you know your mother. She's got a sixth sense when it comes to you. Her room may be upstairs and on the other side of the house, but she knows you're here and she won't rest until she sees that you're safe and healthy. So just get yourself up there straight away before she tries to get her fool self down here."
I raised my hands in mock defeat, turned to Karen and winked, just to see her smile, and then turned toward the house and to my mother. The truth be told I wanted to take the luggage in because I thought it would give me just a few more minutes to prepare myself. Maybe I thought that if I waited long enough I would finally wake up from this nightmare. But I knew for certain that the longer I waited, the less time I would have to spend with her, and that hurt even more.
Stepping into the foyer, for the first time in my life I felt like a stranger in my own home. The shiny hardwood floors felt foreign beneath my feet. Looking into the study on my right I could see my mother, years earlier, typing furiously at her computer, rushing to make the deadline for her research paper. To the left I could see my grandmother, sitting in the family room in front of a roaring fire, watching the television. Memories that were so vivid, but so fleeting. In their place came the present, and it was an odd sensation. Nothing like the warmth I had felt just moments earlier coming down the drive. This was the sense of reality. The cold loneliness of not knowing what lay ahead but still pushing onward. And so I did push on. Up the stairs that stretched before me and towards my mother's room.
I had always loved her bedroom. It was in the back corner of the house and untrue to its farmhouse tradition, had large plate windows down both outside walls. The room itself was L-shaped the bed positioned at the inside corner of the "L", facing the windows. The windows themselves looked out on the pond behind the house and the lines of trees that corralled it. The most spectacular sunsets could be seen from my mother's bedroom and for that matter the best sunrises as well, such was the situation of the house. I stepped quietly into the room, my weight causing the mahogany floorboards beneath me to creak.
"Michael, don't be shy. What have I told you? You always enter a room like you were meant to be there, no matter if you should or not."
My mother's voice called to me like a whip. She had a way of always knowing what I was up to. She could scold with her voice better than she could have done with her fist. Even now, at this point in her life, though weak, her voice was determined and firm.
"Sorry, Kit. Thought that maybe you were asleep. I didn't mean to startle you."
"You didn't startle me. I haven't been surprised by anything in years," she claimed matter-of-factly.
"How are you feeling?" I asked cautiously, and found out quickly, with reason.
"How the hell do you think I feel? I'm dying. I feel like…"
"Kit! I get it. You feel bad," I interrupted.
"Oh, kids. You always did hate it when I cursed. I always felt like I was the child when you would scold me," she giggled softly, remembering.
"Yeah, well, you got scolded a lot." I still had not completely turned towards her. I chose to stare out the windows at the water, contemplating the loons as they gently floated across.
"Come here Michael. I know you don't want to see me like this, but I need to see you."
I dropped my head, pained by the thought that any time she looked at me could be her last. I walked to the edge of the bed, my head still down, now focusing on the white down comforter that draped across her legs. Suddenly I remembered that she always had a white down comforter on her bed. She would buy new ones through the years, the decorative stitching may have varied, but they would always be white linen stuffed with down.
"You look horrible. You're losing weight again, aren't you? I swear you worry too much. You have too much of your grandmother in you, that's what it is. That woman worried over everything. God bless her, she would be a wreck right now if she were here."
"Yeah, well, neither one of us could stand it when you got sick, even if it was a cold. You hardly ever got sick and when you would it felt like…well, it felt wrong," I said, still counting the threads in the comforter.
"Well, she was my Mom and you are my son. Your mother and your children are always the first and sometimes the only people who really worry when you are ill. You'll learn that with Alexa. When Karen is busy taking care of you, it will be Alexa walking the floor. That is if she doesn't already."
"She's only two. She doesn't really understand. But yeah, she's a worrier already. She can't stand to see anyone in pain. She just doesn't understand how or why. But she notices things."
"Well, it's genetic apparently. Where are they anyway, Karen and Alexa?"
"I left them to Clarissa to unload the car and get settled. They should be in any minute."
"What a shame I won't see her grow up," she said, suddenly lamenting. "I would have loved to see her off to the Prom and be there when you give her away to some handsome young man who has swept her off her feet."
"Oh don't worry. You won't miss that because I'm not giving her away. I don't care how far she's been swept. She's mine and that's that," I joked, trying to lighten the mood.
"You only think she's yours. Someday her prince will find her. And no matter what you do to keep them apart, they will be together somehow…"she trailed off. I looked up to see her staring off at something beyond the landscape, her brow knitted with distraction. I suddenly felt that she was not speaking to me, but more like through me, to someone else in some distant place.
"Hey you two," Karen piped as she entered the room. "How's my favorite mother-in-law?"
Mom came back from her thoughts, a smile beaming across her face, her porcelain skin bending to its call, but even at sixty-eight years old, hardly wrinkling. Karen slipped in next to me, bent over and brushed her lips against my mother's cheek and then smoothed back her auburn hair with a gentle hand. My mother's crystal blue eyes shimmered at this excited attention.
"I can't believe how good you look Mother Kit. Not one gray hair. It's unnatural. Tell me the truth, Clarissa colors your hair for you doesn't she? Go on, you can tell me," Karen teased, gently nudging Mom with the back of her arm as she nestled in beside her on the bed.
"Oh, Karen, stop it," my mother waved her hand slightly, physically brushing off Karen's teasing. "Where's that baby? I haven't seen her in months."
"She's asleep in the other room. It was a long trip for a little thing like her. Too much excitement. I'm sure she'll wake up in a little while. In the mean time I think I'm going to go down and get some tea. How about you two?"
"I'm fine dear. You go on ahead," my mother smiled weakly, the excitement of the visit already draining her.
"Me, too. I'll just sit with Kit for a while," I said, trying to force a grin on Karen's behalf.
It was hard to think that after losing her own mother at just a young age, only six years old, that now Karen would be losing the only other woman she had ever been close to.
"Okay, I'll be back in a minute," Karen said as she left the room.
"I don't think you could have found a kinder woman on the planet than her," my mother said softly as Karen's footsteps disappeared down the hall.
"She's one in a million. I still feel insecure about our age difference sometimes though. Sometimes I look at her and all I think is 'What in the world is a woman of twenty-eight doing with a forty-one year old husband.' Then I start worrying about being this old and having a two- year old daughter. God, when she's eighteen, I'll be fifty-nine. That scares the hell out of me."
"Well, sometimes it's not how long we are with someone, or even who exactly that someone is, that matters. What counts is that we have, is even for a short time, a person that we can call our own. Someone so close to us that they are part of our souls. That's what counts," my mother spoke as if setting down prophecy. But then again, she always had.
She had a mysterious aura surrounding her. She could hand out advice to anyone with the spirit that she had lived through the same things as they had and more, yet I couldn't remember anything out of the ordinary in her life. All I could remember was a work-at-home mother that sent me off to school each morning and was waiting on the porch for me in the afternoon. She occasionally left for a few weeks on research trips, conventions, or educational talks, but mostly she studied from books and made her observations on the wildlife living on our property, all 325 acres of it. I don't know how she did it, but in between caring for my grandmother and myself my mother had become one of the top researchers in the field of wildlife biology. In less than twenty years she had inventoried and categorized every living creature in the woods and field surrounding out home. She had found innovative ways of tagging and marking some of the most elusive animals and through her papers and speeches had began a kind of revolution in the art of animal tracking and population census. She was, in her own way, a pioneer of science.
Yet, for all her scientific knowledge and love of wildlife, I had still managed to slip through the cracks to become a journalist. I love nature, always have, and how could I not, but writing was a passion. After college I landed a job at a small local paper, working the small town circuit here in Maryland. I worked there for ten years, scraping out a living until one day a guy from the New York Times walked in and offered me a job, saying he had read my work, and felt good about taking a chance on me. I jumped at the chance, packed my bags, and left Maryland, and my mother, behind. Five years later I left the hectic life of New York, bored with my job, which had become little more than mailroom/secretary position with very little writing, and the sterile confines of the city. I took a job with a man who was looking for someone to follow him around the Amazon Basin, writing his memoirs. This man as it turned out, was a fifty-five year old divorcee, looking for adventure, but ended up only finding repeated cases of food poisoning and thousands upon thousand of mosquito bites. Somehow though, I managed to turn his two-year stumble through the bush into something he was actually proud to have lived through. It wasn't quite fiction, I mean it was about him, he really did spend two years in the Amazon, and yes he really did come face to face with a good number of dangerous, even venomous, creatures, but the rest was mostly prose.
I made my way back to the States after our excursion and for some reason made Chicago home. I rented a less than roomy apartment that dripped when it rained and housed numerous small mammals when it snowed, but it was cheap. I had never imagined that at thirty-eight I would be so close to poverty and without a decent job. I called my mother everyday, but never let her know what was really going on, though at times I thought she did. She always had a way of calling and asking me if I needed money or telling me she was wiring some anyway, just when I needed it most. I had been back in the States for six months when some buddies took me out to a club for my birthday. It was a small establishment; I probably never would have gone in by myself, since I rarely drank and was actually a little intimidated by the nightlife of the city. We had sat around for an hour or so talking and laughing when I saw her walk in. She was strikingly beautiful. I could tell that she was much younger than I was, she entered between two other young women, and the trio giggled and nudged each other all the way to the bar. My every instinct told me to go up to her and introduce myself. But the rational part of my brain butted in, warning me that it had been at least four years since my last date and not many twenty- something's would go for a man with no money, no real job, who was pushing twice her age.
But just as the thought entered my mind, the strangest thing happened – she looked up from the bar and looked me straight in the eye. She didn't blink, didn't blush, and didn't falter. I felt all of a sudden that she had walked in this very night looking for me. Not looking for a date, or a one-night stand, but me. My heart almost stopped. After a few beats, I got up from the table, not one word to my mates, and walked straight up to her and asked her to dance. She accepted and that's how it started. After that night we hardly left each other's side. She moved in with me three weeks later, together we could afford a larger, drier apartment, and within four months, we were married. Unfortunately for my mother, we were married at the courthouse, no big ceremony, just Karen's parents and my mother and Clarissa there to witness and give us their blessing.
Meeting and marrying Karen was the closest thing to a miracle I have ever experienced. After I met her, I got an offer by a publisher friend-of- a-friend who had read the memoirs of a certain aged lunatic, for whatever reason, and decided that maybe I should try my hand at writing novels. I took him up on the idea, and three months later handed in my first transcript. And as inexplicably as why he read the memoirs, he decided to publish it. It wasn't a huge success, but it offered me the opportunity to write and publish another, which led to another, and yet another. At some point, I was labeled one of the best new writers of the decade, at made it on the New York Times best-seller list. It was actually the first time my name was seriously printed in a paper for which I wrote for ten years. Karen and I celebrated my big hit along with the birth of our new daughter, Alexa. Turning thirty-nine it seemed wasn't going to be such a bad thing after all.
It wasn't until Alexa's first birthday party that I found out that something was wrong with my mother. Apparently something had been wrong for a long time. She had been diagnosed with lymphoma three weeks prior to the party and was scheduled to begin treatment the following day after flying back to Baltimore. I remember begging her to stay in Chicago for treatment, but she insisted that with her new home health nurse she would be fine and did not want to be a burden. That night she took Alexa to sleep next to her, holding her close the entire night. The next morning she laid Alexa in her crib, called a cab and left for the airport without waking a soul. Either Karen or myself would travel to Baltimore at least once a month, sometimes with Alexa, to check up on her with our own eyes as she would deniably lie on the phone and I could tell that her nurse, Clarissa, was under strict orders not to reveal anything.
Here we were now, a year later, watching the strongest soul I had ever met, slowly fade away despite her smiles and struggling cheery demeanor. I looked at her now, staring off into the new night sky, her skin so pale, her once strong, athletic muscle depleted, looking half her normal size. Yet there was something inside of her that glowed. Strength uncommonly known that had the will to resist such a trespass as cancer. I had not suspected that this disease would overcome her as quickly as within a year.
I was started from my thoughts when I heard Karen coming down the hall, the sound of china clinking on a tray proceeding her footsteps. I knew instantly that she had disregarded our earlier testaments and was bringing us tea. Green tea to be exact. The same thing my mother had always drank when we were nervous or worried. It had become over the years, my only way of knowing when something was wrong with her, as she would never have told me outright.
"Okay you two," Karen announced brightly as she entered, " despite your earlier comments, I have brought you both tea." She placed the wooden tray on a large oak table in front of one of the windows and began pouring the hot liquid into the fragile china cups that had belonged to my grandmother.
"Well Kit, what do you say? Tea after all?" I asked raising a cup in her direction and watching her wave it away, her eyes slowly closing.
"Kit. That's so odd," Karen mused," You have to be the only man I know that calls his mother that.'
"I've always called her that," I said, suddenly realizing, after all these years, that it did sound strange. "I don't think I even know why I started calling her that."
"Because he did," I heard my mother say weakly.
"Who did?" I asked softly, noticing she was drifting off to sleep.
"He called me Kate when everyone else called me Katherine. But you were too young. The best you could do was 'Kit.' You were so much like him. Two of a kind. I wish you had known sooner."
"Known what?" I asked. But it was too late. She was asleep. My inquiries would have to wait until morning.
