Title: Back In Stars Hollow
Chapter 11: Life To The Fullest
A/N: This is the last chapter.
This is it.
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The house is dark. Quiet. If I strain I can hear the soft breathing of the three men in the house, along with the dripping upstairs faucet that has been neglected for years.
But I don't want to strain.
I slip from my childhood room; the last one I had, anyway. The one I returned to for a few days after high school graduation…the one where I lost my virginity…the one where I lost my innocence.
Not in that order, of course.
I lost my innocence long before I ever lost my virginity.
My first sexual partner was a worried teenage boy who adored me…after three years of cynically ignoring him, I assented to a date. We had sex within three weeks, and then I never talked to him again. He became the big man on campus, and I stayed lost in the background, drowning in my loneliness and sorrow.
I was lonely in a house of four.
I was lonely in a family of six.
I was lonely in an extended family of twelve.
It's tough, not being related to your father…being only half related to your brothers. Only knowing one grandmother, one grandfather…and the grandfather I know isn't even biological.
The story of my conception is outlandish…soap-opera like…it's amazing to me that I'm even alive. If it weren't for my mother's shitty college boyfriend, I wouldn't be.
My mother was artificially inseminated.
This caused a lot of trouble during a two-year-period of my life, one I like to call "The Reign Of Terror". (Apparently, tenth grade history got to me.)
The Christmas when I was ten, my mother decided I should meet her father, Chris. Chris had just called her after ten years and informed her that his other daughter was sick with breast cancer, and would she come say goodbye before G.G. died?
My mother said that she would, and decided to bring me along, to meet her father. My mother left the rest of my family behind, and only told my aunt Lane where we were going, leaving everyone else in the dark.
I met my biological maternal grandfather at the age of ten and seven/eighths, December 26, 2018. He was mean to my mother when he realized who I was, and they had a fight. A loud one. It wasn't until almost a year and a half later when I realized what it was about. It was about me, and about how my mother had been artificially inseminated.
My grandfather threw us out.
My mother cried on the drive home. It was dark out, and raining, and she was having trouble driving. I was drifting into sleep, because the drive was a very long one. Less than five minutes from our house, my mother asked me for a tissue. Unfortunately, I was asleep, so she leaned over me and opened the glove compartment, keeping one eye on the road. The tissues weren't coming from their bag, however, and so she took her eyes from the road for one second.
Car, of course. How else would this story end?
My mother swerved as the car came towards us.
A tree jumped out as us.
Car crash sound effects.
Shot of both of us unconscious.
Fade to black.
As you can see, my director father, along with my love of directing, has caused my story-telling skills to have a movie-like quality.
It only works sometimes.
My father freaked. He left my little brothers with my grandparents and rushed to the hospital. My mother was okay…nothing serious. They were checking her out, making sure she didn't have any internal bleeding. I, on the other hand, was bleeding out.
When I'd fallen asleep, I'd slipped from my seatbelt, the petite little girl that I was. When the car hit the tree, I was flung forward into the dashboard, resulting in massive internal bleeding, along with a large cut on my forehead, from the windshield.
They wouldn't let my father back to see me. He ran to my mother's bedside immediately.
"Rory, they won't let me see Amy," he said quickly, urgently, breathing hard from all the yelling he'd just done.
"She's in surgery, isn't she?" my mother asked.
"They said, 'immediate family only'."
"You're family," my mother pointed out. "He's family," she told the nurse running her ultrasound.
"No, Ror, I'm not." He sighed. "I haven't adopted her yet. I'm still not legal."
"I knew procrastination was stupid." She sighed. "Oh, I bet Amy's so alone right now. Call my mother," she commanded my father. "So that Amy'll have someone with her."
"What about me?"
"There's nothing we can do about it right now, Jess."
"I know," he sighed, resigned. "I'll go call Lorelai."
"Thank you." My mother kissed my father, and he walked off. The nurse doing my mother's ultrasound stared at something on the screen, and then rushed off to find a superior.
I was fine, eventually. I only spent a day in the Pediatric ICU, resting up from surgery, and then spent a normal week in a hospital room with my mother. My internal bleeding stopped itself, and now I lead a relatively normal life. I just never had to participate in P.E. again, much to my delight.
My mother, on the other hand. God. Mom. I still miss her like hell.
The nurse found signs of ovarian cancer in the ultrasound…it was just a hunch, so he found his superior. The doctor immediately ordered tests, and they came back the next day.
It was true.
My mother was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer on December 27, 2018…the day after she'd been scheduled to see her half-sister, who was slowly dying of breast cancer.
After the doctor explained the symptoms, my mother realized that she'd had many of them for a while…unexplained weight loss; nausea; abdominal swelling; fatigue; abnormal bleeding….
My mother started treatment the day after my eleventh birthday.
She was sick, on and off, for the next year and a half.
She missed my twelfth birthday; she spent the day curled up in bed.
She missed my sixth grade graduation by less than a month.
She died May 1, 2020.
Twenty years ago today.
She missed my graduation from college…the first graduation from college since my great-grandparents.
She missed both of my brother's graduations.
She never met the men my brothers grew up to be.
She never met me as a woman.
She never met Justin's wife.
She never met Will's live-in girlfriend.
She missed the huge fight her best friends Paris and Baylor got into when their daughter brought a man home.
She missed the huge fight her other best friends Dave and Lane got into when their son brought two women home.
She missed the day my father….
She's never met Meg.
That's one of the strangest things…my mother's never met the woman who replaced her in my father's life.
Oh, no, he didn't get remarried…he got another writer.
Trust me, it was a big deal.
You know…I'm getting married tomorrow.
Everyone told me it was strange, deciding to get married the day after the anniversary of my mother's death.
But…while I love my mother, and still miss her, I know that she wouldn't want me sad. The last thing she ever said to me was, "Don't ever cry about me, Amy. Don't mourn my death; celebrate my life. And always remember—live life to the fullest…you never know when it will change forever." She smiled. "Always smile…don't ever forget I love you. From the bottom of my heart." She kissed me, gently, on the cheek.
I'm celebrating my mother's life tomorrow. I refuse to cry. I will live my life to the fullest. I will dance my heart out at the wedding. I will dance with my father in the traditional father-daughter dance, and we will both imagine we are holding my mother.
And when that one tear slips down, like I know it will, I will smile. My mother is running her finger down my cheek, and whispering how proud she is of me.