Remembering a Mother’s Dying Days

What if my memory of my mother’s dying is not accurate?

What if she didn’t die in a small, hilltop tuberculosis hospital in Southern Ohio? What if she didn’t die, weighing 69 pounds while her two daughters waited outside, wondering why she held on to her life?

These adjectives, nouns, and verbs have been part of my psyche for more decades than I care to acknowledge but never have I considered that they may not be accurate ones.

Maybe she died in a chintz covered room in Beverly Hills. Perhaps she died with well wishing friends and family around her, holding her thin, wrinkled hands adorned with diamonds. Possibly she passed on to the next life feeling good about the progress she made in this one, knowing she had fulfilled her responsibility for learning what she was sent to acquire.

Maybe she didn’t die.

But she did. I was there.

I was there, in the cold, impersonal rooms with no chairs for families or friends to sit a they waited for their supposed loved ones to pass to the next life.

Maybe I wasn’t as cold and unfeeling as it now seems I was.Maybe my sister showed greater expression of grief toward what my mother was experiencing than I remember. Perhaps I wasn’t as intimidated by my sister and her most recent and demanding husband but I was.

I was nineteen, had taken the bus on summer break from college, across the country. The college dorm “mother”had informed me I had a long distance call. I…