Twenty-eight years ago. I remember some things clearly, but other things are muddled. For instance, I remember the fight down to Reno and where I sat on the airplane coming home from Reno. I remember my father, my brother, my mother, and the hospital, but I don’t recall much of my brother’s family (or the fact that I stayed with them and slept in the living room – that’s all a blur). I remember where I was when we got the call, and much of what we did over the ensuing two days. Father’s Day, the 18th, was a road trip for three of us.
I flew down in an MD-83, if I recall correctly. The series of airplanes had been grounded for several months following a deadly airline crash that had been determined to be a fault in the plane itself. They had only recently started allowing the model to fly again. I figured I was in a safest airplane around since it had been thoroughly worked over, right? I remember I sat in the tail section going down and coming home; coming home I didn’t even have a window, only the roar of the engine in my ear.
I don’t remember when I arrived in Reno or much of what happened that first night, was it Thursday or Friday? I don’t recall. My brother might: the events of Saturday the 17th impacted him as hard as it did me. We lost our best friend and family advocate that horrid Saturday.
Mom was hospitalized due to yet another round on pneumonia and the impacts of the disease on her weakened lungs. Mom had emphysema (they call it COPD nowadays). I don’t know how many times she had been hospitalized in the past because our parents were very good at concealing things from us kids. Sickness was only one of the many things they hid from us and we had to find out from other sources that something huge had happened, like our sister’s pregnancies.
I remember how she looked, lying in that hospital bed, tubes in her nose and oxygen doing the breathing for her. Morphine made it hard for her to pay attention to anything or respond to us. She pulled at the tubes in her nose, irritated. She held my hand for a moment.
There’s a moment in your life when you have to make a decision you don’t want to make. The nurses pulled me aside, the last of the family members to arrive (my sister couldn’t be there: she was pregnant and I didn’t know she was pregnant until then). Did I agree with my brother and father to take my mother – my best friend – off of oxygen and all other life support? My heart screamed, “NO!” but my mind knew what Mom wanted.
Dad said he couldn’t do the “death watch” – he’d done it too many times before in his life and Mom was the love of his life. We were going to go out for lunch, away from the hospital. I held Mom’s hand and spoke to her, telling her that I didn’t want to let her go or lose her, but – in the end – “you will do what you want to do”. I knew the Scots’ blood in her would stubbornly go down the road she wanted no matter what the rest of us felt.
We were looking at some “art” car on the street when we got the call. Mom had made her decision. In the elevator, Dad seemed shrunken and old. He pounded his fists on the wall. My brother entered the room first and gently closed Mom’s eyes before Dad or I could see her. Not that she was there. A shell was there, a fragile casing that once held my mother. I had the strange feeling that she was still in the room, in another, happier, dimension. Somewhere we couldn’t see into, but which existed parallel to us.
That night we sat in Dad’s motel room doing – what? I don’t remember. What I do recall is my brother was on call with the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department and he got an emergency call. How Dad and I managed to tag along, I don’t know. Terry had to hitch up the trailer with the flood lights and we headed north on SR-447 in the dark. A trucker hauling cardboard for recycling had rolled on a corner north of Gerlach.
Once, on the loneliest stretch (and that is a lonely highway), Terry briefly turned on lights and sirens for us. We made jokes. Dad asked Terry about the afterlife. It snowed. Dad and I pretended we were undercover cops and “real bad honchos” while we stayed out of the way. We felt sadness, too: it was a fatality and the trucker had family somewhere in Texas.
Father’s Day. We loaded up in Dad’s Buick and took a road trip. Terry and I argued about the wildflowers we saw along the way. We stopped in Portolla, California, at a family friend’s house. Dad wanted to speak to them alone: old friends from our early childhood, and a mortician by trade, Dad needed reassurance and advice on how to go forward. From there, we circled over to Donner Lake. Parked about the azure lake, One of them asked, “What is that blue out there?” Eager to prove myself an expert in wildflowers, I peered out the window.
“I don’t see anything blue,” I complained.
“I think it’s called ‘Donner Lake'” one of them dead-panned. This is how my family pranks each other.
We laughed most of the day. I was the butt of more jokes, but that is the only one I remember. It was a jab at the fact I live in a state with plenty of water and they lived in Nevada – and I am no expert in wildflowers. We ate somewhere in Truckee, California. Mom would have loved the day: all the expensive little shops to wander through and browse. It was bittersweet, full of laughter, and one of my favorite memories of family.
*Photo of Mom with a lampshade on her head. 1952
Jaci Dawn 