Next in line

When my mother died I felt relief. Relief that her suffering and pain was over.  Relief that my responsibilities to her and her health were over. Then guilt for feeling that way. It is hard to explain what the two of us went through these last five years, but for me it was never more clear then when I exited my house several days after she died and saw an ambulance and a fire truck. I vomited in the bushes. Then I went to my neighbor's house and patted his hand as he told me that taking care of his significant other was just too much for him to continue to do. I understood.

Then there are the days where I feel other emotions; loneliness, sadness, and recently despair. I feel twinges in my chest and worry I'm having a heart attack. I think about how easy it is to be killed driving a vehicle. I can hardly read the newspaper with all of its death and destruction because any day now that will be me. I've always been a worrier, but suddenly I feel my mortality. I tried to analyze the feelings one day this week as I drove the familiar route to The Condo to meet with an electrician, and after I got all the thoughts unscrambled in my brain, it hit me. I was scared because I was next in line.

We always think there is a map to the way things work. We are born. We go to school. We go to college. We find jobs and spouses and have families. Then comes the growing older part which eventually leads to our death and the path ends. We aren't suppose to die before our parents. Our children aren't suppose to die before us. There is a path and each step leads us down that road, and although we know deep down that life isn't that way we still want to believe it is and that that map is the way things work. I've lost my father and now my mother and that leaves...me.

Later in the day while I was going through files and shredding old paperwork, I came across a folder with some of my mother's writing. She had started a blog a year or so after mine and the few entries she had written were printed out and in the folder. The one I chose to read was her first entry on her blog. I cried.

Tuesday, February 8, 2003 - written by Connie Mason on her blog Wise Words

"Light a cigarette for me and put it between my fingers," rasped the emaciated form in the nursing home bed.

"But mother, you know you can't smoke," I countered in surprise.

"Honey, when I see that cigarette burning, I know I'm still alive," she croaked wryly.

I did as she asked and watched as the hand holding the cigarette fell across her deformed chest. She studied the curling smoke for a moment, smiled almost contentedly, and closed her eyes. I rescued the cigarette from her slackened grip and extinguished it in the bedside ashtray. Barely two hours later she was dead. She was 53 years old.

My mother never knew Larry Bird, who was growing up in a town 20 miles west. She never knew Mohammed Ali who was Cassius Clay to her in a city 25 miles southeast. She never knew her only grandson, nor her second granddaughter. Most precious to her were the seventeen months she spent with her first granddaughter. My mother died of cancer when I was thirty-two.

As I turned from her bedside to the rest of my life, I knew we had just played a serious game of Tag and I was IT.