It’s so weird, listening to a person you love being reduced to sentences and words. She likes . . . She did . . . . Justifying her life to a stranger. To one who is not judging and yet it feels as if we remember every single thing about her, maybe we can conjure her back into her body. If we remember the perfect detail or the right part of history, maybe it will nullify the results we can see coming from a mile away.
Wait, we say, you misunderstand. We know we told you the story, but we forgot a detail. Please let that change your mind. It’s important, we swear.
It’s all important. It’s important that her favorite color is green. It’s important that she was writing a book. It’s important how many people, 40 years after her kids moved out, still view her as their second mom, because of the power of her love. It’s important that she believed in standing up to power. It’s important that her greatest fear for me was that I might not learn to love enough, that I might not learn to love people I don’t know. It’s important that her favorite thing about baseball was the cute players’ butts.
It’s important that she isn’t perfect. It’s important that she taught us a tone of voice that can be nasty and that we all, including her, including me, have fought to not use it. It’s important that she was often overwhelmed, and it’s important that, until her surgery and illness a couple years ago, she worried too much. It’s important that she can give a mean guilt trip (and it’s also important that she usually spares her grandchildren from that). It’s important that she is amazingly stubborn and that has been one of her best gifts and one of her problems. It’s important that sometimes she acts like a child and just to get a cookie lights up her eyes.
And yet, this is all words. Words and not soul, and not spirit, and not heart. I want them all to remain true. I want every little bit of her to be true and present in her own body. I do not want this 2D representation of a 5D person.
We try to impress on the doctors: this history is true, everything we’ve told you is true, but this is the truth that tells a lie. This is the truth that makes you believe wrong things about a person who is more amazing than you can fathom.
And so we wait. And we hope. We try to hope just the right amount, whatever that is. We see the bad news coming. We try to stave it off and recognize that we may not be able to, all at the same time. We hope. We tell her to open her eyes, to squeeze our hands. We plead for her to open her eyes, to squeeze our hands. We beg. We tell her we love her. That she’s the toughest woman we know. That we know she tricked the doctors with her heart, and now it’s time to trick the doctors with her brain.
We wait for tomorrow, and hope it brings a better day.
