I’ll tell you from experience that the night sky looks different after your mom dies. When the moon is out and you remember some old poem about how every person that has ever had working eyes has seen the same moon including your mother but realize that she will never look at it the same way again either. The night of my life was the time I met my mother at the emergency room of a hospital that was not hers and I had to leave after learning she had another obstruction, guests aren’t allowed overnight, especially in this pandemic. Her body couldn’t keep itself anymore. After she was admitted to the hospital again for maybe the seventh time or more that year, I lost track. Her in pain and in pain. Pain tells you there is nothing you can do to change it to stop this to move her immovable situation. And leaving her after three a.m. on a weekday, I voiced the most pained cry I had ever grieved in my car, screamed into myself hitting my steering wheel as hard as I could without setting off the airbag. Knowing what I’ve been afraid of for years was still coming. One of the most moments of my life was a week into my mom being on hospice. This was the night I took a walk while aunt watched mom and when I got back and sat with them my mom began to freeze in place looking up in staring at the ceiling. In shock I looked at the ceiling too seeing the ceiling but I didn’t know for sure that that’s what she was seeing too. Her trying to stand, trying, and aunt and I trying to hold her, to keep her from falling because that’d be the worst thing. Telling her it’s okay to go and me not wanting her to, for real right now mom, and me being terrified she might go now and me being terrified that I’d have to see my mom go without my sister, afraid I’d have to live with this alone but she didn’t go then. And mom after relaxing, closed her eyes, seeming tired and ready for a well deserved rest apologized and said something along the tune of “I’m sorry, I must’ve had a cramp in my foot,” and me being shocked and me trying not to laugh and wanting to believe what she said was true and knowing it wasn’t. And isn’t this the mercy of God? That a seizure could feel like a foot cramp.
FINALIST MERCY 2023
Gaven Lover’s writing is soaked in grief and set on fire with her hope of what is to come.