I sat with my mom one August afternoon in her bedroom as she was dying. Outside, an eclipse was starting, the sun disappearing behind the moon. Clouds slowly coming in, then passing away. I’d been playing her favorite Big Band era songs, all the ones she and my dad had danced the Jitterbug to back in high school. Count Basie cleaving through that deep quiet of the space of someone passing between realms.
I called on the priest to come give her Last Rites. He told me how he had died three times and had come back. Outside, the fading sunlight through the grapevines made little half-moon shadows dance across the bedroom wall. All I could do was watch them come and go as Fr. McKee anointed her head and hands with oil. I told him I wished he could bring her back just as he had come back. He said this was a beautiful way to go.
She was holding on for so long. The hospice nurse told me sometimes they will hold on, as if they’re waiting for something, or someone, before they let go.
My mom and I sat together alone. I pulled one of her favorite books from the bookshelf, hoping to find something that might soothe her. I opened it up, out fell her store list: Ham, Tums, make-up. And then an envelope, next to it. A letter from my dad, postmarked 1944, who wasn’t yet my dad, but an 18-year-old high school kid out somewhere in the North Atlantic on a Navy ship, looking for Hitler’s mines, paving the way for an invasion of Normandy.
I asked my mom if I should read the letter to her. She couldn’t answer.
So I began to read…“And when this war is over, we’ll be together always. I’ll never leave you.” An incantation spoken, my dad had come into the room. He’s 18 again, sitting down next to my mom at 91. She’s 18 again. I’m at once their elder, but not even born, a child sitting between them, reaching for their hands. Our ages disappear. He has come for her.
**
When you sit next to someone who is dying, everything compresses and simultaneously expands. Time un-braids itself. Then it all starts to come. Half-remembered family stories, words they didn’t say, things you never asked. All come tumbling out. It’s a flash flood. A mad, loud rush of a flash flood, everything your old house old dreams your parents’ first kiss a jar of fireflies by your bed your mom’s smile your dad’s laugh washing down on you into a gully and you find yourself being carried away with it all.
Where does a story just between two people go after they’re gone?
When your parents leave you, and you’re left in that boundless place without them, you would give anything in the world for one last word from them, one laugh, one squeeze on the knee that it’s all gonna be okay. Can an alchemy be summoned with the fragments that remain ~ the photographs found and the ones lost to time, stories brought back to life in the telling, their voices entombed in the loops of their letters ~ all alloyed together to hold on to even as it’s all being carried away?
Maybe I’m just doing this book so that my parents never die. That they live on in its pages. A liturgy to bring them back.
Don’t we all try and do something to hypnotize mortality into thinking it goes on forever?
This is the conversation I never got to have.
“Letter Home,” a limited edition book in hardcover by Stacia Spragg-Braude, to be released in the late summer of 2025.
