A Surgical Cut

I exhaled twice the amount of air I had in my lungs. A sigh for the ages, it made me remember I was alive, but was done as a reaction to something that made me feel dead inside. My mother’s calls generally had that effect on me.

The last time we had spoken was a few weeks earlier when I performed my monthly pilgrimage two hours north mow her lawn due to a blood clot and she could die at any moment.

She lived in a gray trailer with a black, screened-in porch in a restricted senior community on the west coast of Florida. The trailers in her neighborhood were spread far apart giving each a large yard, and she had one of the largest. Other homes in the park were well tended yards with soft, emerald blades of grass and beautiful sections of delicate, bright flowers. My mother’s yard was spread with beige, fibrous plants and sharp hedges of a non-native, half-dead plants. It was difficult to mow due to the amount of dust and sand the mower would kick up and the constant attention required to avoid fire ant mounds.

She was a week early for the reminder call.

“Mom?” I hope I had the right balance of excitement and curiosity while covering up my complete disdain. I wasn’t successful.

“What’s that about?” Her voice, gravely and low, was softer than usual. I didn’t hear the usual TV blaring scandal talk shows in the back either. She didn’t want to be overheard, I surmised, and prepared myself for an elaborate story. Quickly, I redoubled my effort.

“No, just a rough day, so far. What’s going on?” I asked.

She paused. 

The average conversation has pauses built into it to lean into a coming revelation or punchline. My mother used pauses or EFFECT, in all caps, to achieve the maximum melodrama possible. The last time I heard this pause was when her boyfriend, an schizophrenic Jordanian painter, had been forced to move out of state with his parents. The parents said that my mother was too much of an unhealthy influence on their son. My mother was beside herself about the injustice of the situation. I thought the parents did the right thing.

“I’m dying,” she said.

I was shocked. This was a new opener for a complaint session, brand new territory.

“Mom, what do you mean you’re dying?”

She coughed with a staccato and followed by a high-pitched ‘ahem.’ It sounded fake. 

“I’m in the hospital. I’m going into surgery tomorrow and they don’t know if I’ll survive.”

I didn’t know how to respond. The words banged around in my head, careening between the sections for disbelief and panic. The silence on the other side was only broken by a sniffle. Snapping out of it, I realized my heart was racing and a panic attack was imminent.

“What happened?” I bit hard on my tongue to stop the rising tide of salty tears. Showing intense emotion would irritate her and would lead to a rant about my sensitivity and lack of self-control.

“You know I’ve been having problems with my uterus?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, I have,” she snapped, annoyed. “They found growth in there and they're going to have to go in there.”

I dutifully waited for her to describe the minutiae. She had the uncanny ability to describe a situation using every negative connotation available to her with an effort towards discomfort. But she paused, using the dead air like a switchblade in an alley. I realized she was not going to fill in any details and I felt claustrophobic..

When my mother described things in a vague way, it usually meant there were omissions, giving enough information to give you a technically true answer, without vital context that would completely alter your understanding. I had become adept at prying some reality by asking pointed questions over the years, but her alleged impending death crumbled my techniques.

“Oh.” It was all I could manage.

“I don’t want to die alone.” She sounded pathetic, but something was gnawing at me. 

“Okay, I’m on my way. I’ll be there in a few hours. I love you.”

“You need to know where you’re going, don’t you?’ She was annoyed. Giving me the details, she hung up without another word. I slapped my flip phone shut and allowed the attack to consume me. Tears and snot and drool leaked out of my face with ugliness building each hyperventilated breath. A thought whispered in the morass of my dissociated, scrambled mind. As the intensity of it grew, my panic began to subside.

Every interaction with the woman who gave birth to me often led to emotional dichotomy. This time, I was terrified about losing my mother, but had doubts as to how dire the situation was.

The walls of the hospital were pale, a milky mustard with a single stripe of a dull color designed to guide your anxiety to various destinations. The scents of bile and sterility stung as I moved along, following a maroon stripe to her section. I entered her room only to see a disheveled, empty bed. A curtain was drawn just beyond it and the bathroom door was open.

“Mom?”

A large curtain that had been drawn across the room. I had missed it. My vision filled with striped tracers along its edges; streaks of color sliding down a pipe. I was beginning to dissociate. Pushing it down, I moved to the edge of the curtain and looked behind it. 

Lou Anne Marshall, her rounded body appearing sullen and weak, laid with her eyes closed unmoving.. Her short, dyed, dark brown hair had stark white roots and was sprinkled with ever-present dandruff. Her face was round, and her nostrils were slightly upturned. Above her lips, a small hint of fine black hair was stark against the morbid, yellow tone of her skin. The rest of her frail, overweight body was covered in a carefully straightened ivory, knitted blanket just above her breasts.

I took another step, fearing I might have been too late. I wasn’t.

Her eyes opened.

“Hi,” she croaked. Her voice was scratchy and her breath labored. 

Coming around the hospital bed, I was unsure how to approach her. The emotional dichotomy returned as the woman who berated and beat me, who reminded me how much she regretted having bore me, simply lying there.

“Hi mom. How are you feeling?”

She gave me a weak smile and cleared her throat.

“I’m okay.” She drew out the last syllable, waving the syllable like a song, giving way to an exception. 

“But I need you to go to my house, grab my checkbook, and pay my HOA fees.”

“What?” I couldn’t have heard that.

“You know, at the house,” again, she drew out the last syllable as if I had trouble comprehending her words. “You have to go to that bitch Marie and give her the check for this month’s fees or I’ll get charged extra. You can come back next week to do the lawn.” She was nonchalant and her voice returned to its usual bark, laden with disdain.

“But, the surgery? When -” 

She cut me off and rolled her eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic.” 

I couldn’t think.

A nurse walked in. Her face had that stretched look of long hours and more cigarettes with a tinge of resignation.

“Hi Lou Anne. How are you feeling?” The words were robotic, a subroutine which ran each time she entered a room, the patient’s name being the only variable. My presence initiated a new command. “Is this your son?” 

“Oh,” she said as if she had forgotten about my presence. “Yeah.”

My mind was racing. A sensation began to stir within me, displacing the ever-present anxiety I always had when engaging with my mother. It was a burning, casually laying itself out on my diaphragm, crystallizing outward. I looked at the nurse.

“Is the procedure my mother is going to have really that dangerous?” The nurse didn’t look at me, barely acknowledging me and continued to run the nursing subroutine of the checking of a patient’s vitals.

“The DNC? It’s fairly routine.” She said.

The burning began to race outward into my guts and lungs. It felt as if my body was catching on fire.

“Well, what about the blood clot?” As the words exited my mouth, my mothers face turned to stone, staring at a point just behind me.

“What blood clot?” the nurse asked, her programming interrupted by unrecognized input. She lifted up her head, straightening her back and dropped her head, allowing her eyes to look at my mother from her upper eyelids. “Lou Ann, what is he talking about?”

My mother’s face turned to the nurse, the blood within draining out of and filling her face in a surreal, emotional ballet. Her eyes regressed to those of a five year old who was attempting to avoid impending punishment, and her mouth momentarily went slack. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat.

“Jim, what blood clot?” As the words dripped out of her mouth, a fearful stare was sent in my direction. Her eyes never made contact. 

The burning sensation was rising fury, a scorching rage that would melt the flesh off her pathetic frame had I the ability. Thirty five years of abuse coalesced into a single, mental snapshot, permanently searing the moment to my mind. I had endured physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse from this woman, beat into submission to act upon her command. Now I stood in front of her while she lay in the hospital bed, weak, fragile, and toxic. 

I looked into her panicked eyes. There may have been shame there, some sense of regret. I had my doubts.

The moment had a finality to it, a whisper beyond time encouraging me to save this scene to my eternal memory. I would never see her again. If she died on the operating table or years later, it no longer mattered.