“It will be a heart attack or a stroke,” my mother told me. “I hope a heart attack. Please be ready.”
“I won’t be ready,” I said.
“You need to be ready,” she said.
“That’s great, but I won’t be ready.”
“I’m ready,” she said. “You be ready.”
My mother has been working on her death for years. Not the actual dying part, but everything that will come after, so that all those parts, all the legalistic things, will just work and work without my intervention. It will be an entire impartial machine, with me either standing outside it or caught inside it, I won’t know until then. I still need to get some things notarized, though.
We talked about the things I need to do on Monday.
Later the nurse told me how, when they were speeding to the ER, she looked over at my mom. My mom was in the passenger’s seat, trembling. Just, only trembling.
Then, when she was in the hospital bed, my mother whispered to the nurse, in little gasps, “I think I’m going! I saw a bright light!” all damp-eyed and sweaty. The nurse told me this, and we both smirked. Someone, somewhere down the line, had fucked up my mother’s bloodwork. She didn’t need to go to the ER at all. She is not dead yet.
“You be ready,” my mother was telling me now, though.
The real reason for our ‘conversation’ was the dumb thing I’d done with a hundred dollar bill the night before. She was horrified.
“Can’t you see I’m scared?” I asked her. I stretched both arms toward her, palms-up.
She was quiet for a long time.
“I…” she said.
“I thought you would have found a new family by now.
“You know, a husband, you’d be married, and he would have a kind family, and maybe they would all go to church –”
I made a sound.
“I know, ‘ugh,’” she repeated after me.
I made the ‘hngh’ sound a second time and doubled over. And I wailed. I wailed and I put both arms around me and hugged myself, because there was no one else to hug me.
“Well, Jenny!” she said indignantly, as if I had suddenly thrown a plate or done something else unexpected and brash.
