It Wasn't Supposed to Happen This Way

 
 

                I was smack in the middle of an odd, but not unpleasant, dream.

                I was on a game show and my ex was just called onstage to be a contestant.  As I watched his current girlfriend throw her arms around him and give him a good luck smooch, I uttered an evil laugh.  Somehow, I knew he was about to be called out for all the awful things he’d done to me.  I was eagerly awaiting his comeuppance.

                Then a disembodied voice spoke.  “Shannon, help me.  Shannon!”

                As I swam out of sleep, I realized my mother was calling me.  It was pitch black.  A glance at my digital clock revealed the time was sometime after five in the morning.  As I struggled to my feet, banishing the tinge of annoyance at having been abruptly awakened out of a pretty great dream, I wondered what could have happened.  Immediately, I thought she may have fallen using the bathroom.  She had just returned from her job as a live-in health aide of a hundred-year-old man.  He died at 7:45 pm the previous Tuesday.  My mother had spent the ensuing days cleaning out his apartment, dragging home all her possessions.  The living room was filled with bins of stuff.  This was her first night sleeping at home in her own bedroom.

                I figured she must have gotten disoriented from the change in environment and tripped over something half asleep. 

                She was not in the bathroom, as I expected.  Instead, she was sitting in the kitchen, slumped over.  Her speech was slurred.  “Shannon, help me.  I can’t breathe.  Please help.  I can’t breathe.”

                I will hear those words echoing in my head for the rest of my life.

                I went into my bedroom and got my cell phone and called 911.  She continued to call to me to help her, entreating them to hurry.  In the meantime, my sister’s boyfriend had come up from the downstairs apartment.  They had been awakened by her cries.

                Once I was off the phone, I went to get dressed and brush my teeth.  Then I heard my sister’s boyfriend yelling that my mother had stopped breathing.  I ran into the kitchen.  Her head was thrown back and she’d passed out. 

                My CPR certification had lapsed many years ago.  I was terrible at it.  During training,  I nearly passed out trying to resuscitate the mannequin. Never in a million years had I envisioned myself in this situation.  But I knew that since my mother wasn’t breathing, if I didn’t give her CPR, she was going to die.

                I gripped her jaw in my hand and took a deep breath, willing myself not to break out into a coughing fit.  It was a miracle I didn’t.  I pressed my lips frantically against hers, pushing air into her lungs, and she moaned.  I wondered if she knew what I was trying to do and was disgusted, my lips pressed against hers in enforced, life giving intimacy, our saliva mingling.

                Even as I desperately tried to revive her, I felt she was already gone.  But I couldn’t give up. 

                EMS arrived.  They were able to restart her heart and get her breathing again in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.  For a few precious minutes, it seemed I had accomplished a miracle.  I had saved her life.  In my relief, I was already thinking this would be my trump card in our next fight, something she couldn’t argue with.  “Well, you weren’t complaining that I’m a slob while I was saving your life!”

                Even so, I viewed the encouraging news with a skepticism I didn’t dare allow to surface into my conscious thoughts. While giving her mouth-to-mouth, I felt her departure, the essence of what made that collection of skin and blood and cells her vanish in an instant.  I may as well have been resuscitating one of those long-ago mannequins, those white people shaped torsos. 

               But I was more than willing to be wrong about that.

                I thought, “man, she’s going to be pissed I gave her my cold.” 

                Knowing my mother as well as I did, I knew she’d complain about it, too.  And I would feign outrage.  It was the dance of our relationship.  But I wanted nothing more in the entire world to have that moment in all its irritating, glorifying annoyance, for us to be restored to normalcy again.

                Then they came out and told us the truth.  My mother was very sick.  Her heart was extremely weak.  They weren’t sure she would ever awaken from the coma she was in.  Blood was not circulating to her fingers and toes.  She would go into renal failure.  Worst of all, she may have sustained brain damage from those minutes without oxygen, when her only sustenance was the meager breath I pushed into her lungs.  There was no telling.

                The doctor was called away while he was speaking to us.  When he returned, he told us her heart had stopped again.  The moment seemed suspended in time.  My family was in deep denial.  We were laughing and talking together like nothing was happening.

                Then he came back again.  “We were unable to restart your mother’s heart,” he announced.  “I’m so sorry.”

                And that was it.  Here we are, several days later, cleaning out my mother’s room and sorting through her things.   My mother had spent two years with very little time off caring for her patient.  She was looking forward to having her life back.  She had made plans to have lunch with friends.  I overheard her telling someone that she planned to remodel several of the rooms in the house. 

                She most certainly did not plan to die.  That was the last thing any of us expected, especially her.

                I’ve never been a one to tell people what they should do with their lives.  I’ve always bristled when people have lectured me about how I should live each day as if it were my last, blah blah, shut up already.  So, I’m not telling anyone anything except life can be the same forever and then change in one unexpected moment, when you’re asleep and dreaming. 

                I’m still hoping that I’m dreaming, that I’m going to wake up in the same ordinary world, that my mother, who I figured would live at least another ten years, isn’t gone forever.