As Jay garbled the words a seafaring Alice wrote sixty years back, he imagined this is how fish might sound to humans. His tongue had jettisoned from the floor of his mouth, causing an elocution outage.
The letter was for George, whom Alice would wed three weeks after making port. Now four years since George’s death, Alice was merely hours from reuniting with the love of her life, again, the thought of which afforded her no small amount of comfort throughout her terminal illness.
What if George had kept the letter to help brace his wife for this very journey, before the palliative sedatives soft-land her into oblivion? That’s how Jay’d romanticized it in his mind as he fumbled the opening lines.
They say a spoken word will travel in seawater at 1,500 metres per second. Jay failed to meet the moment.
His mother would not.
It’s okay, I’ve had a good life.
It was the mother of all affirmations. Articulated unequivocally, clear-headedly, gracefully.
While I sat there, legs flumped over the edge of the gurney, theorizing the sleepless twenty-four hours in the ER were messing with my hearing; while lips moved but turbulence is all I parsed, this is how she would control the narrative. If this was the end, she wouldn’t turn her back on it as much as face the life she lived, and lived well.
A tumour was pushing on my mother’s brain, bent on squeezing out all she knew, felt, remembered; evict her out of existence. It would succeed. She gave it permission to.
By the morning after the diagnosis, my mother already had the aura of someone who didn’t need saving. She was holding court in the ER, proffering encouraging words to patients in the cubicles adjacent to hers, feeding them chocolates. She might have been high from the dexamethasone administered to reduce the swelling in her brain, but the feeding part, that was all her, something so integral to her identity not even a deadly mass could suppress.
Deeper tests would confirm she had an inoperable glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. Malevolent star-shaped cells were forming, multiplying uncontrollably, evolving into the invasive gorgon-like tentacles tasked with mounting the final assault. Radiation therapy was the only recourse. Realistic prognosis? Hard to say exactly, outcomes vary, could be more, say… three months? Side effects? Yes. Hair loss? Likely.
My mother would relinquish a kidney before parting with her hair. And what with the other perks, the headaches, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, loss of appetite… for a chance at maybe ninety extra days? Better the quality of the time I have left.
The Holidays were here and my mother wanted back in her apartment. She wanted an appointment at the hairdresser’s.
When the clock struck midnight on Christmas, the hugs were longer, firmer than usual, the only intimations this Christmas would be her last. She ushered in the New Year never once asking to rest or be driven back to her apartment early, resplendent in her determination to not make her final Holiday a sad one, not for us, not for her. It was the ultimate countdown, and every second was made to account.
I butchered the letter. The more I stammered, the faster I read. The faster I read, the more I stammered. I skipped to the end, where the yearning, the immeasurable desire transcended language. Perhaps I did that part justice.
If there was a way of death and life reaching a mutual understanding, my mother found it, absolving the former and thanking her lucky stars for the latter.
She died on her own terms, with all of her hair. In the end, all the tumour took from her is a little space.