Suspended in time

Soon, nobody will remember what the point was.

She walked into the bathroom off the living room, just a regular action, that on any other day wouldn’t have seemed exceptional. My eyes were glued to the television, watching Dan Jansen skate rounds at the Lillehammer games with a fierceness and artistry that humbled me. The Olympics wasn’t just a global event. In my home, it was a family ritual. We all sat or stood together around the TV, cheering on our favorites, disappointed when they lost, excited by the race and the camaraderie of it all. It was sister/brotherhood at its best. It was a kind of family — connected, together, alive, vibrant.

I called out to my mother. She was moaning from the bathroom. I should have known something was off, but I’d become accustomed to these cancer-fueled moments of pain and agony so I thought nothing of it. I told her to come and watch the games and then I saw my sister run into the bathroom. Soon there would be paramedics asking invasive questions of my stubborn mouth which couldn’t and wouldn’t operate properly for fear that it would precede a deluge of tears that knew no balm and then a vision of an ambulance — time running backwards in slow motion. I would relay and replay the scene in my mind of events that happened around this moment — a few days earlier, while walking our dog, purposely stepping in a pile of dog shit thinking that would bring my mother good luck, following the superstitious and highly erroneous idea that stepping in shit will somehow erase all the bad luck.

Only there was just sad here coupled with the trying to make sense of 8-year journey in which my mother wrestled with cancer demons. There would still be time to see my mother after the bathroom incident. Days and nights spent in the hospital while she lay there and looked at me, a worried expression on her face. That was her resting face — she loved us so dearly that the emotion of the moment overtook me entirely and I arrested myself to it. I turned away from her, toward the TV and shed one tear, then another, and watched as the closing ceremonies took place, enraptured by the grace and vitality of the athletes, putting on a pained smile.