---

My mother is ninety-five years old. The thought will not leave my head, from the time when the Lifeline lady called my cell phone a few minutes ago until now, and it shows no sign of going away.

My mother has fallen, and she can not get up. My infinitely strong mother, who survived the Depression, four children, a heart attack, the loss of my father twenty years ago, and so much more. She has rented ‘the button’ for quite a few years, but has never pressed it until now. She did not push it when she fell down the stairs the first time, and I found her in the kitchen, mopping blood off the back of her head. She did not push it when she fell down the stairs the second time because of that damned cat, and my daughter found her in the basement bathroom with a similar cut on the back of her head. I’ve always thought of her as immortal, even though I know better.

She is lying on the floor in the kitchen, wanting nothing more than to get back on her feet and continue with her morning chores, but she cannot get her feet under her. If only she could have me pull that chair over so she can brace herself against it, because it’s only a bruise, after all. She has work to do, a quilt to sew, Christmas cards to read under her magnifying glass. This is not a good time for her to be on the floor, and she tells me so. Repeatedly.

My mother is ninety-five years old. We moved across the street from her when the last of our children were born. They are now out of the house. One of them has a baby of her own. Over twenty years, and we’ve known this could happen at any time. We’ve been afraid this would happen. We’ve been denying that it could happen.

She does not want me to call the ambulance. There is no pain, except when she moves in the wrong direction. A few cushions, a little time to recover, and she’ll be back up and working. The snow has been swept off the back deck and the front driveway, showing how much she has already done this early in the morning. Then she fell down on the kitchen linoleum, without even tripping over something. It annoys her. Still, she does not protest when I call the ambulance. Even if it is just a bruise, she still needs to get an X-ray, or so I explain while getting her some cushions to prop her frail, thin limbs into a more comfortable position.

There are still muscles beneath that parchment skin, pulling tendons into sharp relief while she moves, although her pajamas cover most of her body. Farm life has treated her unfairly, with wrinkled skin from the sun and twinges of arthritis from the chill, but when spring comes again and she recovers from this, she will be right out there in the garden again, hoeing weeds and harvesting okra. Or so I tell myself.

The doorbell rings moments after the ambulance dispatcher hangs up, announcing the arrival of a young police officer dusted with snow and red-cheeked in the cold. He is ever so polite, introducing himself to my mother and checking to make sure everything is under control. He is followed almost immediately by the ambulance and three young people, far too young to be entrusted with the care of the most precious element of my life, but I stand back and let them work, taking her blood pressure and chatting. There is no pain, or at least that is what my mother says repeatedly, although with the caveat of just how her leg is positioned.

I am numb with emotions watching the scene, unlike the professionals at the scene. Undoubtedly each of them has seen this repeated countless times before. But this is special. This is my mother. She is ninety-five years old. Our family is related to nearly everyone in the county. My mother knows them all. She asks the ambulance people about their names, curious queries to find out if perhaps they are related to us too, but they are not.

I cannot watch, because I am consumed with the urge to do something, anything other than watch. Anything at all, even a futile gesture. Since the snow has dusted the ground, I take my mother’s broom and sweep clean paths for the ambulance people. She is ninety-five. She has already swept most of the driveway, but I sweep the rest so the ambulance people will not track snow into the house or their vehicle. I cannot watch them load her into the back, but bend over my sweeping with renewed vigor, only looking up when the driver tells me that they will be taking her to the big hospital a half-hour away instead of our local hospital, because they think she has broken her hip, and the local hospital does not have the resources to deal with that kind of surgery.

I know she has broken her hip. I knew it from the first moment I saw her on the kitchen floor. Denial has been my shield against the fear. I cling to that forlorn hope as the ambulance leaves and I close up her house for her return. It will only be a bruise. She may stay a day or two in the hospital, but she will be back into this house with so many stairs going up and down to all levels. As a distraction for my distraught mind, I make sure all of my siblings are notified, bending over my phone keyboard with careful pokes. My mother will be fine. It will only be a bruise. But I do not say that. I stick to the bare facts. The simple, cold facts as I stand in the snow and look at the window of her house where the Christmas tree still shines.

I go back inside and turn the tree off before I travel to the hospital.

---

Hospitals are terrible places. They are places of life, where our children were born, and death. The first does not make up for the second, no matter how clean and sterile they are. The corridors of the emergency ward are familiar from my other visits. A friend’s motorcycle accident. My oldest child’s nervous breakdown when his marriage came apart. Now, my mother is lying in one of the rooms, getting the best of care. I know it far more than words. My niece works at the hospital in intensive care. My sister-in-law manages a nursing home. My daughter works with Alzheimer's patients in Kansas City. I still do not wish to be here. My heart writhes with bile, but my mother is treating this as just another visit, cheerful as always despite my hidden anxiety.

For an emergency room ward, there does not seem to be any sense of urgency or panic. We wait. My niece drops by briefly with encouraging words from her fellow nurses before returning to her work on the other side of the hospital. My sister-in-law comes by with three of her grandchildren in tow. Squirming little creatures who cannot sit still or be quiet, they grate on my nerves like acid. My mother is quiet, because she has been here before. For her heart attack over twenty years ago. When she fell down the stairs. Twice. She has the patience that I do not.

When the technicians arrive with the X-ray machine, I take the opportunity to flee. There is an empty waiting room for family with a loud television set and ancient magazines, but no place to plug in my tired phone. I do not know what is worse, to be with my mother at this time or here. Still, they are taking an X-ray of her hip, so she deserves her privacy.

I walk, get a soda, visit the bathroom, check my phone again and pass on the news, but the lump of lead in my belly remains. When the machine leaves her room, I even get a look at the results, but they mean nothing to me. Give me a flowchart, a chunk of Windows scripting, a pop-up error. Bones are not my specialty. I can not abide blood, or talking to people. The image is meaningless, or I simply refuse to see the break. It could be either.

Another bathroom visit to empty my cramped gut and when I return, she is gone. For a moment, my heart stops. The emergency room is a good place for that, but my mind overrules my instincts. She has simply been moved, and after collecting my coat and soda, I make the trek to her room, and the others filling it. My brother, my sister-in-law, various nephews and nieces. It is inevitable. There is a swarming multitude who can claim one bit of blood or another to her. Grandma was one of seven siblings, and her mother one of eight. Even though I only have three siblings of my own, with their marriages, divorces, and deaths, my mother has over a dozen or two grandchildren, and uncounted great-grandchildren.

I am an extra thumb in this room, and more are arriving soon. Although my mother has an IV of drugs, she is still filled with smiles and alertness, and suggests that I go home for a bit to recover. It has been several hours since ‘the button’ was pushed, and even she can see how frazzled I have become.

I trudge out to my car through the biting cold, which cuts like a knife against my skin, slicing through my thick winter coat and furry vest. My mother gave me this vest for Christmas some years ago, and every year I’ve used it to guard against the cold.

It is so cold.

I drive with exquisite care, returning to my home along snow-blown highways. The cold has bitten deep within me, keeping me from relaxing even in the slightest. I make a trip across the street to check on my mother’s home, turning off any lights I missed the first time and making sure the stove is off. She will return to this house of far too many stairs. I know it. I say it quietly to myself while I cross the street to my own home and take my delayed shower, turning the water on high to melt the last bits of ice.

All that is left is the waiting. I curl up on the bed, phone next to my head and try to rest. My sister is coming up from Texas and will be here tomorrow. Both of my brothers are at the hospital. They are operating to put a pin in her hip soon. I cannot stop trembling, blowing my nose, or dreading whenever the phone buzzes.

My temperature is over a hundred.

The same cursed bug that every one of my siblings has recovered from managed to strike me down at the worst possible time. I text the group that my siblings have set up to keep us all up to date, all fifteen or so phones, and return to bed under the influence of NyQuil and Motrin, my only two friends.

The next day, I am worse, trapped in my bed just like my mother, only I can make the staggering path to the bathroom. Drink, take medicine, sleep, check texts. The days pass in tar-like rapidity. My boss from work tells me to take as much time as I need. She lost her father last year. Lost. We say that so casually as a species. I lost my own father twenty-two years ago, like we were at the mall and he wandered off. My time beneath the covers gives me the chance to contemplate the great mysteries of life and death while my mother recovers from her surgery.

She is ninety-five years old. I am forty years her junior, and I am flattened by a simple virus.

By the time I am feeling remotely human and non-contagious, they move my mother to the nursing home where my sister-in-law works so she can undergo rehab. It is a small nursing home in a small town, much more friendly than the big city hospital, and less expensive. That will please her. My mother is — to put it lightly — cheap. She was ten years old when the Great Depression started. We had a garden at the farm, filled with rows for me to hoe and beans for me to pick. Harvest meant canning, and carrying glass jars down to the cellar. I still cannot get used to green beans out of a tin can, or jelly that does not have a skim of paraffin across the top to keep it from molding.

It will be an exceedingly busy day for her, but my sister-in-law has things well under control. I go in to work, battle the beasts that rise from paperwork left untended, and prepare to go visit her in the evening when I get another text.

Mom had a heart attack.

Far from recovering in the nursing home to regain her mobility, she now has been moved to the small town hospital. It will be a very busy time there tonight, so I am discouraged from visiting.

The second night, I am given the permission I did not really need to ask for. I am a man of more than fifty years. I do not need to ask to see my mother. Then I see my mother in the hospital bed, looking so thin and worn, and I am once again a little boy who only wants to be picked up and held.

I do not cry. Our family does not cry much at all. I must be strong for my mother, who is stronger than the pillars that hold up the sky. I stay and talk while my sister helps her eat dinner. We laugh a little, and I keep my mother company while my sister leaves to make some phone calls.

My mother will recover. She is strong. She has to be, for there are so many people who come to see her. Cousins. Brothers. Relatives related by marriage somewhere up several limbs in the tree. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren by the handful. A schedule is set up. Hope emerges again.

My sister is staying at mom’s house, doing some of her work remotely and traveling to be with my mother at times during the day. She is not used to the countryside around here after dark. There is an infinite space of nothing between our house and the small town hospital, a darkness that eats up headlights and suggests bounding deer. I find myself driving home several nights with her behind me, so she does not fret. I am the baby of the family. She was old enough to babysit me when I was born, and now I return the favor.

Then another call. Another heart attack.

My sister-in-law gathers my siblings in the evening after we leave the hospital. She is a strong woman, much like my mother, while we are much like sheep with this hanging over us. She talks. We listen. Hope dies. The dreaded ‘hospice’ word is used, as well as ‘do not resuscitate’ and ‘mom says.’

Ninety-five years. There will not be a ninety-sixth.

The schedule tightens. There is a relative with her every hour of the day now. I fling myself into work to avoid thinking. Things that have been delayed for months get done. Things that don’t need to be done for months get done too. When my time to stay with mom comes, I travel to the hospital. I help feed her. Barbeque chicken. Pudding. Sips of juice. Just like she used to feed me when I was too young to take care of myself. I do not cry. She makes sure I know about her bible and hymnal, with the verses and hymns marked. There is no talk of her estate because she has settled that already. Her only property not sold under contract is her own house. Even her car, which she has been unable to drive since three years ago, has been passed on to a grandchild.

Hope blooms a little in my heart. She seems so much stronger. I escort my sister back home and guard her against the darkness.

Then my phone rings as I am getting into bed. Another heart attack. Not going to make it. Come now. I am throwing on my clothes when my sister calls from across the street, asking if I’m ready to go, which I’m not. She’s down the driveway and off to the hospital before I can find my shoes.

Our car needs gas. When we are at the station, filling up, my brother arrives. We are much more alike than I realized. We drive together through the darkness to the hospital.

Mom has passed.

My sister arrived just before. She got to say goodbye. I did not. I don’t regret it. I am a frail reed, and the weight would have broken me in half. The body in the bed is not my mother anymore. She has gone to be with my father and all the rest of her relatives who have already passed.

I cannot look more than once, and even that I regret.

We mourn. Later, the four of us gather in the hospital lobby. The minister arrives and says a few words. There are things that need to be done. Papers to be signed. Unpleasant realities. Tears, but only a few. We are our mother’s children, after all.

The rest will wait until later.

---

I find myself back in my mother’s kitchen, where I stood two weeks ago. I can still feel her here in this house, much like I could feel my grandmother in her house many years ago. For her, it was grandma’s cookies. For now, it is the package of Oreos that I always tried to keep on her kitchen table. She was so thin over the last few years, and any calories we could trick into her was a victory. Besides, if I kept the cookies in my house, my children would devour them in a day. It made a good excuse, along with the soda in her garage fridge giving me an excuse to drop by every morning before work to check on her.

For now, cookies and soda have taken a back seat to the funeral preparations. So many things we should have done years ago, so many pictures that needed a scribbled notation on the back to tell what distant relative was in the Army in 1945. The simple request she made for her hymnal and bible is complicated by our search, finding four different hymnals and twelve bibles.

As the siblings we have not been for many years, we four gather together and evaluate the pictures, the notes, the bookmarks, and the memories. I find my father’s grade cards and feel vindicated that I at least was marginally more successful in school, although not by much. To examine every picture would be impossible because of the sheer volume, but we separate out the ones of only mom and dad, putting the rest to one side for me to digitize later. It will be another one of the tasks that I should have done before, but…

The time before the funeral is odd, flowing at an erratic rate. There is the trip to the funeral home, where we four brave children chicken out and pick the same casket and vault that our mother did for our father twenty some years ago. A trip to the mall to buy a suit coat for my tall son, who towers over me. A single day at work to crush problems which could not wait. The first of many days cleaning out the house for the inevitable sale. Canceling credit cards and phone service, including a call to the ‘button people’ to express our thanks for their service, which was critical in my mother’s hour of need.

Then the visitation.

My suit is worse than useless, binding around the shoulders and limiting how and where I can reach. Even the pockets are fakes, leaving me nowhere to put my cold fingers when the wind cuts through the thin suit. Too hot in summer and no protection in winter, although I wear my mother’s gift sweater underneath it, and that at least helps. At least until the visitation begins, and the sweat begins to damply accumulate. Polite smiles. Bob the head. Try not to ask just who these people are. I swear more than once that at my funeral, I’m having name tags made up. It won’t matter to me, but the survivors will cheer my memory.

The visitors shake hands and say a few words before going to the casket. I have not done so yet. Not until my wife goes with me as a brace against my foolish emotions. Once again, this is not my mother. They have done wonders with makeup and the other tools of their trade, but I refuse to admit her reality even as I admire the way her red hair still looks just as it did before, without a single strand of grey. My father was nearly bald by my age, but I have her genes, although not the color. Bits of reddish brown decorate the chapel from grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including my eldest brother who wears just a touch of red like a brief kiss on the head. My own children are here, just as brown-haired as most, and my one new grandchild, who has long locks of coal black.

My cousins, four boys from my childhood who have never grown up, come over to talk, as well as neighbors and friends and relatives of all kinds. I still want to do nothing but hide under my bed, but this is something far better. I see them all so infrequently, scattered to the corners of the country with families of their own. I only see them at… funerals, come to think of it.

When the visitation that I dreaded so much is over, I regret how short it seemed.

---

The wind at the cemetery cuts through my suit again, making the sweat from my time in the small church freeze into stiff ice splinters. It seemed oddly familiar in a time-traveling way to go back to the church of my youth with all of the congregation having aged and greyed and wrinkled into near unrecognizability. There were barely enough pews there, but not everybody traveled through the biting Kansas wind out to the cemetery. The minister blessedly seems just as cold as the rest of us, and hurries through a few brief words while we huddle for warmth. My oldest son is with me, but my youngest daughter remained behind to nurse her child. Less than a month old, he is far better off to remain out of the weather.

As we gather, young and old united in our love for my mother and our search for relief from the cutting wind, I am reminded of all the funerals she served at. They were countless, both in this small rural town when they lived at the farm as well as after she moved to town, across the street from me. Funeral cake after cake, serving the relatives as they attended the reception after the funeral of friend, family, and church member. Years and years of cakes, her parents, her sister and two of her brothers, spouses of her children, and the grandchild she had lost.

It is my turn now, seated on a thin metal chair in the freezing wind with my siblings. Where my mother was the eldest child, and is survived by three of her brothers, I am the youngest, and will most likely see my siblings pass before me. Then it will truly be my turn to be mourned while my children bear my casket and my grandchildren eat cake with distant relatives afterward.

Then, before we all freeze, it is over, and everybody heads for their vehicle to return to the warm church and lunch. As I pass my mother’s casket, I reach out and touch the frozen steel with my bare fingers before walking onward, back to the car, back to the church, and to hold my grandson in her stead.

Until I see you again. Goodbye, mom. I will do my best to make you proud.