The Room

I should have known it was coming.

I knew it was coming, she said so earlier in the day.

My mother went into a coma at around 11:00 PM. She was put on a ventilator, and the wait was on, it was the only life support she was to receive.

I got there around 1:00 AM, my wife literally threw a pitcher of water on me to get me up after an extremely hard night of drinking. My mates had carried me home an hour earlier after I passed out at the bar.

Once I had some wits about me, I remember looking down the darkened hall of the hospital. I remember being drenched with a pitcher of cold water, and then the hospital hall. How I got there I don’t know. My aunt and uncle were in the room, they had nothing to say, the hissing sound of the respirator said it all. She no longer looked human, just a grotesque caricature of the woman she once was. Her body arching with each injection of oxygen.

Over the next three hours I cried, I begged, I moaned in desperation, I tried to make a deal with a God I didn’t believe in. When the priest came to give last rights I got into an argument with him because he wasn’t respectful enough. He was in a pissed off mood having been woken because I demanded she be given her sacrament.

I cried some more.

By 4:30 AM her heart rate had dropped to 28 BPM, we all knew she was on her way out.

I’d beg her to fight it, push on and get through the night, and I don’t know if she heard me or not, but when I talked to her heart would bump up a couple of beats.

29bpm... 30bpm... 26bpm.

“I’m sorry Mom, but your granddaughter needs her nanny!!

27bpm... 28bpm... 25bpm.

I don’t know when my aunt left, but it was just her and I in there. On my knees, holding her hand, tears pouring out of my eyes.

I became a scared little boy, afraid of the unknown, wanting her to hold me and protect me from the evil I had imagined. I had to let her go. It was I causing her pain.

24bpm.

“I know it hurts mom, you can go, It doesn’t have to hurt anymore. We’ll all be ok!”

25bpm.

“I love you Mom, don’t suffer for us, let it go.”

22bpm.

“I love you Mom”

14bpm.

Everything is going to be ok.

10bpm.

zero…

I felt a wave of nothingness pass over me, something I’ve never felt before. The closest I can come to explaining it would be as if I felt every thought she held, every moment of her life, every laugh, every tear, every single bit, silently pass through me and into the void, for a brief moment in my mind’s eye, she was larger than life itself, then...gone.

The Nurse came into the room and removed the tube from down her now lifeless throat, and what I was looking at was no longer my mother, it was just a body, it could have been anyones. It looked like my mother externally, but it was just an empty vessel, there was nothing of her in it. She left with the wave.

The nurse gave me a knowing look like she had seen this a thousand times in a thousand rooms.

“I’m sorry”

“Don’t be sorry, there’s nothing to be sorry for”

I walked out of the room, down the hall, and left through the main entrance. A cool breeze was blowing, the sky was clear and full of the special color just before the sun rises. Morning birds were singing their songs.

I heard my mother’s joy in them.