It’s been a while since my sisters and brother all got together. When we were growing up there were just us five siblings running barefoot along the Consumnes River. Life was full of slow days and animals and a big dusty house in the country. It was filled with our collective imaginations that could quickly overwhelm a room, and spill into other rooms and yet more rooms until the large, rambling house was flooded with the wealth of our games and our dreams.
It’s been a long time since we were all together.
About a month ago I got a call from my sister. “You should come and visit Mom now if you want to see her at all. Her cancer’s worse.” Mom wasn’t the kind of woman who died. She was the kind of person who lived vibrantly even when the pain would have brought a strong man to his knees. She’d spent the last five years since her diagnosis living each day as fully as the spreading cancer would allow. She gardened and sewed and when she couldn’t do those things anymore she read and called her kids and grandkids to talk.
Mom was in the hospital when I came to see her. She lived two thousand miles away and it had been a little over six months since I saw her. I thought she’d look a lot worse, but she was sitting up, preparing to go home. She was alert and we chatted happily…or rather I chattered happily to her. I told her about my plans and my adventures and she laughed and told me she was happy to see me happy. She told me firmly that I needed to get more color into my house when I redecorated. That was a good day. Maybe the last good day.
The next day, we heard from the doctor. Yes, she looked pretty good, but the cancer was spreading through her liver. He didn’t expect her to live more than five to seven days.
Word spread. Well, to be honest, Mom picked up the phone and spread the word herself. Come here, she told her children and brothers and her mother. I want to see you. And we came. We filled the house. We filled the rooms with our children whose imaginations spilled from room to room until the house seemed ready to break open. Even as we gathered and held each other and cried and laughed. Mom grew weaker. At night, as I lay sleepless on the sofa, I could hear the murmur of my dad’s voice and Mom’s soft slurred reply as they said those last precious things.
Somewhere in the house a child stirred and then became silent as I listened in the dark to the murmuring and the quiet and the creaking of the wind—“This is what it sounds like when your mother is alive,” I told myself. “This is what it sounds like when the world is still whole.”