October 2

This is the day mom is scheduled to have her surgery
I met with her once already, to make sure everything is well.
She was dressed in a hospital gown the color of frothed toothpaste.
The blinding overhead lights made her hair look bright white, and her skin a sickly pale.
She looks far older and more ill than she is now.
Don't worry about me, Bumpkin.
I will myself not to cry. It is easy, in this place of hope.
Easier than at home where the lights are dim and the smell of mold creeps. Home, where there are lies, and battles, and constant strife.
Home, where my brother will come to the house after hours of phone calls and begging and resentfully give my crying mother the pills she needs to stop her body aches, which he greedily keeps at his house instead of here.
Home, where I collapse on the couch and try not to listen to the passionate arguments raging in the kitchen.
There, I cannot stop the tears.

I remember swimming in their lake in the woods as a child, catching frogs with my brother as mom waded. She would go no deeper than her ankles. It was too cold, she insisted.
I remember her hair tossing in the wet spring breeze and realize I cannot recall the color.
I remember the toad we chased on the mossy bank, through the forget-me-nots that sprouted there, the lake water drying on our bent backs in the sun.
Mom helping us search for the runaway toad, only to lift her foot and discover it there, flattened and mutilated out of pure accident.

I remember every long, frightened drive back home whenever I got a call that mom was choking or fell or had some appalling bodily dysfunction.
Hurry! Stumble. Aneurism. Vomiting. Bleeding. Ambulance. Life. Death. Teeth.
And all the hospital gowns, some green, some blue. Her hair getting perpetually whiter and thinner with each visit.
Maybe it was the light bulbs. Maybe.

The toad did not die then. It lurched away into the muck with what body it had left.
I lay awake that very night thinking of it. Thinking about it dying slowly, painfully, in the weeds, floating aimlessly liked drowned cloth, leaving its body which was crushed like a soda can by my mother's clumsy foot. Wondering how alone it must be.

I thought of it many a time as I lay collapsed on the sofa, tuned out from the clamor and tears behind me. I felt a hole inside of me of uncertain size slowly crust over like a scab, painless yet ever present.
I lay blankly, watching the cat destroy the furniture, but not caring. I slept, sinking, and left my body.

These things come again, tethered to me always.

I say goodbye to mom at length as they steal her away from me to the operating room.
It is dark out, and I did not realize how much time had passed.
For the first time I notice hot tears drying on my cheeks, and I am ashamed.