Heart and Soul

I have been to funerals since I was six years old and my great grandmother died. My grandmother told me she was sleeping, which was terrifying because they put her in the ground and buried her!

Most of the funerals I went to throughout my life were random acquaintances or very old relatives. They seemed as natural as snow in the winter and heat in the summer.

Until my mother died.

There was nothing natural about that. One year my children were in elementary school, and my friends, who were pyschologists and priests, were saying we needed to break from our parents, so for the first time in my life I was not going home two or three times a month. Then, just before Mother's Day and her 58th birthday my mother called out of the blue to say she and my father were driving up for the afternoon.

I  ran out and bought grocery store chocolate cake that was one of the ugliest cakes I'd ever seen, but all that was available. Then I went to the mall and bought her a pair of gold heart earrings and got home just before they arrived.

My son wanted to show Grammy how we played our duet Heart and Soul, but I put him off. I said this wasn't the time and we could do it next time. We ate the cake, took pictures, opened the earrings and my mother and I walked to the end of the driveway together.

This was odd because she had trouble breathing and hadn't wanted to walk more than a few steps for a very long time. She asked questions about where we were in respect to town and how many streets over to the main street and other odd things as if she were going to have to find us by herself in the near future.

And then a couple weeks later we got a call late in the afternoon. Mom was being flown to Saint Louis University Hospital and we needed to come right away. We threw clean clothes in a basket along with bread and lunchmeat and drove! We dropped the children off in Taylorville with my sister's children at one of her friend's home and arrived in Saint Louis well after dark.

My sister and I sat in a waiting room with our husbands, grandmother, father and my mother's best friend who was also my aunt and my godmother. We saw Mom briefly in the ICU that night and the next morning each of us had a couple minutes before they took her into surgery. Trying to be cheerful I said, "Well, it's all downhill from now on." The look of terror on my mother's face immediately let me know I hadn't said it right. I'd meant once the surgery was over, she'd be fine and not have to worry anymore.

She didn't have to worry, she never came off the machines after the surgery was finished. Her heart had given up.

And I was left stunned for nearly five years.

How can someone just disappear like that? How is it possible that something that created you like a god can disappear from your life? You can see her. You can touch her. She is there, but she is gone! Escaped like smoke up a chimney, but without even a trace left behind. Silently. Permanently. Like some horrible magic trick that will not bring her back when the joke is over.

And yet, in the weeks that followed we were swallowed up in the scent of roses twice. Once on the back porch around which no roses grew and once in our van speeding down a city street. If nothing else they brought back the memories of her.