My parents had met just after my dad returned home from serving in World War II. He was making his way through the crowd on the main street of their little town to find a good place to watch the Fourth of July parade honoring the returning vets. The street was packed with townspeople, waving flags and wearing red, white, and blue.
“Wilder!” It was his best friend, George, standing with a handful of guys, the usual suspects with whom my dad had spent his youth. “Old man Stinson says we can watch from the roof of the White Cross.”
They’d all shuffled into the White Cross Pharmacy and headed up the back stairs to the roof, just in time to see the high school marching band making its way down the street. They were playing “In the Mood.” Leading the band was the drum majorette, throwing her baton high in the air and twirling around before catching it on the way down.
My dad nudged George. “Who’s that?”
George gaped at him. “Who’s that? It’s Claudia Cummings, brainless! Every guy in town is after her. Get in line, pal.”
He didn’t get in line. He marched right to the front of it. On their first date, he took her to a supper club he couldn’t afford that featured live music, and they danced the night away. They were engaged shortly thereafter, and he spent the next year trying to convince her father and grandfather he was worthy of this extraordinary girl.
They were married a year after that, and moved into a little story-and-a-half house they built, not unlike other postwar houses around town. Word had it, they bought the first television in town, and friends and neighbors would come over to watch this brand-new form of entertainment in my parents’ living room.
My dad was transferred for his job—sales—several times during the intervening years, ending up in Minneapolis, where I was born, in the house by the creek where the snapping turtle lurked.
But as my parents neared retirement age, their thoughts drifted back toward their hometown. By chance, the little postwar-era-style bungalow they had built when they first got married went on the market, so my dad bought it as a surprise for my mom, and they settled into their last chapter in the house where they had begun their first.
My mom was delighted to find that, all of those years later, the art deco fixture she had picked out for their bedroom ceiling light when she was a young bride was still there.
It was the last thing she saw before we transferred her to the hospice room we had set up for her.
A framed picture of the two of them as a young married couple hung on the wall, and it always gave me an unsettling feeling about the passage of time. There they were in that photo, so young and beautiful, dressed up for a night on the town, my mom in a flowy green dress and my dad, dapper as ever, in a suit and bow tie. Nearly seventy years later, she lay dying in that same house.
She had often said that the years had passed so quickly, in an instant, an entire lifetime filled with home, children, love, loss, career success and then retirement, my parents’ golden years spent kicking up their heels with friends and family until my mother couldn’t kick anymore.
One minute, she was a young bride, the next a powerful career woman in corporate America—she used to tell me she was Wonder Woman in disguise, and I believed her, and still do—and the next, she was dying. Fragile as a baby bird. Emaciated by not just cancer but the treatment meant to hold it at bay.
“This is going to be so hard for you.”
It had all happened so fast.
On her last day, they had arrived with the hospital bed in an effort to make her more comfortable, but then there was the matter of moving her into it. She was completely immobile at that point—all her muscle was gone; she couldn’t even raise her own head. She claimed to be ninety pounds, but I didn’t believe it. Seventy? Eighty? She was the definition of skin and bone. That was what the cancer had done.
To move her to the hospital bed in the guest bedroom, my brother and I just scooped her up and carried her there, holding each other’s arms to create a sort of chair, her riding in the middle.
“I feel like Cleopatra!” she’d said, smiling from ear to ear.
Earlier, the minister had come and given her the last rites. He asked us all—my dad, my brother, and me—to hold hands around her bedside while he said some words I didn’t hear or understand. I held one of her hands; my dad held the other. At one point I caught her eye, and she gave me a little smirk. Too much fuss for her.
Her longtime doctor had visited, too, earlier in the day. My dad noted several times at the funeral that the doctor was famous for not making house calls, and yet there he was. He came for my mother.
“You have taught me so much about how to live life to the fullest,” the doctor had said to her, holding her hand. “It has been my honor to know you.”
I watched from the doorway as he’d put a hand on her cheek. “You are an extraordinary woman,” he said. “You have lived an extraordinary life. You have raised a wonderful family together with your husband of a million years. Such a marriage you’ve had. We’re all envious of it. You have so much to be proud of. To look back on. You will live on in your son and daughter and their children if they ever get busy and get on with their lives. You will not be forgotten.”
My mother managed a smile and a nod.
“Be at peace, wonderful lady,” he said. “You will leave this earth better than you found it. That is all any of us can ask.”
I had never seen this—a deathbed farewell. So that was how it was done. I hadn’t done it. I couldn’t. I hardly said anything to her that day.
My mom looked up at her doctor and smiled. “Take care of him,” she said, and I knew she meant my dad. “He’s going to need all hands on deck when I’m gone.” Her voice was thin and papery.
A solemn look passed between them. “Like I would care for my own father,” he said, and I watched him wipe a tear from her eye.
Later, after my mom had closed her eyes, the hospice nurse pulled me aside. “She’s in a lot of pain,” the nurse said. “We usually give them morphine at this stage to keep them comfortable.”
I nodded, my own grief strangling my words into silence.
“Do I have your permission to—” She held my gaze. “You don’t want her in any pain.”
I looked into this woman’s eyes, and I knew what she was saying to me. My mom weighed all of eighty pounds at this point, and she was in terrible pain. She’d had her last rites, and her family was gathered. This was the end.
My mom was already drifting into another world, her eyes fluttering open and closed. I wondered if Gram, who had passed a decade earlier, and my other brother, Randy, who had died of a heart attack shortly thereafter, were nearby.
“Please do what you can to keep her comfortable. We don’t want her in any pain.”
And I knew it was the end. A feeling of utter panic shot through me. One dose of morphine and the person who had loved me first and fiercest, my rock of steadfast support during every crazy and ill-advised decision I had ever made, my touchstone who made me laugh during good times and cried with me and shored me up during hard times, the woman whose wit and wisdom were razor sharp, would never open her eyes again and, soon, would not be alive on this earth any longer.
How could that possibly be? And then what would I do?