Free When the Messenger Is Hot by Elizabeth Crane Page A

but that with antibiotics she should be home in a week, I believe him and I do not consider the reality that pneumonia + cancer + one lung = bad. I consider only that all the math problems I’ve been doing lately add up to bad. When he says she might miss Thanksgiving I feel grateful for curable diseases like pneumonia but remember how bummed out she was when she missed Easter and I believe the doctors one last time. Later, not so much.
    When my father drops me off at the hospital the next morning to find my mother in a morphine-induced coma, I understand only that the nurse practitioner whatever the hell that is must be mistaken when she says, It’s just a matter of days . I understand that she does not know me and does not know that this is my mother, that I have no siblings or husband or children and furthermore that things were just starting to get better with me and my mother and that I will need more time, that she will need more time, that I am sure that over the next twenty years things will naturally improve even more especially after she is miraculously cured and has life-changing revelations as a result of being cured that lead her to the serenity she hasn’t quite found yet in spite of looking in a lot of places. This is followed by me explaining to the nurse practitioner that she must wake my mother up immediately so that I can talk to her and tell her that while the people at Memorial Sloan-Kettering seem perfectly pleasant and all, that it is really full of quacks and liars and people with weird titles that I never heard of before and that I love her very much but she needs to snap out of it and heal now, followed by me demanding to speak to the president of the hospital and all of the scientists who thought up these horrible, painful, ineffective non-miracle cures so that I can explain that sixty-three is an unacceptable age for my mother to die, which is followed by me realizing that I have just turned into my mother.
    So I call my father and when he arrives at the same time as the actual doctor who says he’s so sorry, I do not cry and I do not understand for another twenty-four hours that this isn’t a mistake and that she cannot be woken up. I understand only that junkies eventually wake up and I fail to see the difference. I take turns with my father holding my mother’s hand for the next forty-eight hours and we do nothing besides watch her breathe because that would be wrong. When I come back from the cafeteria with my twenty-fifth cup of coffee, I notice that the old lady in the next bed is no longer there and assume she died until it occurs to me that they moved her because my mother is about to die. I meet my cousin at the door and tell her to just try to remember my mom how she was and burst into tears when she tells me her five-year-old lit a candle for her and prayed to Santa Claus and hands me a drawing with “I’m sorry” written in letters so big that the Y is on the other side.
    When one of the nurses kindly suggests removing my mother’s pink socks as well as the diamond ring from her fingers before she goes, I cringe, I remove both the socks and the ring and I feel like a thief. This is followed by me realizing that this is not the diamond ring I’d dreamed of owning followed by wondering about the need for removing the pink socks. When another nurse mentions that my mom could linger like this for a while and asks if I’d like the priest to come by, I look at my father and we nod vigorously at the exact same time even though I have more than a few questions about god that to date remain unanswered and as he reads the last rites I listen in confusion. When the phone rings with a call from her own minister who’s on her way up and my mother takes her last meager gasp in that second, I do not fail to recognize that maybe god is in touch with my mom, even if he’s crossed me off his call sheet. When the priest tells us she’s with Jesus