Baby's Breath -- a memoir essay
When I was younger, I used to have dreams of my mother's funeral. Night terrors I'd wake up sweating from, certain it’d already happened. I was aware of it in the distant way children are; in unlocked imagination as an untouchable concept until it was close enough to grasp.
In these dreams, mourners’ chins hung heavy, heads bent in rows, seated in plastic chairs, as if they were the only ones grieving. Clusters of delicate baby’s breath, soft exhalations in the air; violet orchids, more beautiful inside than out; roses, reaching out despite the pain they caused. The fragrance of flowers carried on the wind along with a chorus of voices, a collective grief that rose like smoke. The scene unfolded in an outdoor pavilion surrounded by vibrant bushes and a white gazebo. It was peaceful, if one could call the aftermath of a mother’s death peaceful—filled with whispered prayers and a haze of detached emotion. A speech delivered by a clinical preacher whose words were muffled and indistinct, avoiding eye contact with those who truly knew her. Rows of familiar, unfamiliar, and somewhat familiar faces, their mouths turned down and eyes hollow. They appeared solid yet fuzzy, static figures with barely functioning limbs distorted into outlines of relatives.
Blurred vignettes of her passing played out like the memory she’d already become, as painless as the God she believed in thought fit. Why it was up to Him, I was too angry to question, but if the He she worshipped were real, He would grant this ending as a show of faith—not for her, but for me, who was, is, skeptical and faithless.
I wanted it to be easy, just this once. I wanted the universe to be kinder to her than it had ever been. Hadn't it taken enough? Hadn't she given enough? Hadn’t we? When she went, she’d do so quickly, so she didn't have to suffer, and the warm celebration following would make up for the cold expanse her bones left behind. It would be painful, but beautiful; like having her as a mother; like being the daughter she wanted; like reconciling this horrible truth before witnessing it.
I wish it started like that.
Instead it started like this:
I was pulled out of school that day, without warning, the first indication that something was wrong. We never did anything without a plan, thanks to my stepmother's obsessive tendencies. We weren’t the kind of family that thrived on spontaneity or reunions. Our love was built on half-hearted insults and poorly timed jokes. We laughed too loudly at family gatherings and pretended we weren't bothered when tragedy struck. Emotions, sincerity, genuinity didn’t fit into our agenda. That was indication number two: Dad’s rare quietness, my stepmother’s solemn face, a seismic shift in our dynamic.
The shaking of my foundation was reflected in my sister’s tear tracks and etched into my brother’s tired frame. Nausea churned in my stomach before I even realized why.
The silent ride home. We were sat down on the old, evergreen couch that wrapped around the living room. Pinched eyebrows, folded hands, the pensive, We need to talk. I've grown familiar with this routine by now; when the family dog died; when the divorced was announced; when my uncle landed himself in prison; anytime a size-eight Earthquake struck and something capital-S Serious happened. These moments were no time for joking, a rarity in our house where everything was taken as such.
“Your mother is in the hospital,”
One beat, two beats, reverberating through my body. I floated before snapping back inside myself, wanting to end reality but not being able to disconnect from the weight of the moment. It kept me grounded and I dug my fingers into the holes of my jeans.
"There was nothing they could do."
Such carefully chosen words. I think I heard it one time in a Grey’s Anatomy episode. It was out of place in our living room.
I was aware my mother would pass, but I didn’t understand the impact her absence would have. It was less a question of if, and more a question of when, and more a question of how I was going to survive when she was no longer here.
December 21, 2017, wrapped its icy tendrils around my heart and squeezed, stopping it and the fantasy I imagined. The nightmares ceased, but only because they were replaced by a reality infinitely worse.
We were loaded into the car, herded like cows, slow and unsure. Six of us crammed into the white Honda we’d had since 2013, before my brother wrecked it three times and the dents could be seen from the inside. I sat next to my sister and brother, my stepmother in the passenger seat — Malachi was always calling shotgun, much to my dismay, to my parent’s you’ll get it when you’re older, but this time he hadn’t said a word and no one brought it up. Dad drove, like always. Without normal conversation to tide us over, the tension was loud.
Old trash crammed into the water bottle pockets of the seats and crushed underfoot. Desperation and fear crashed in my head, the music nearly muted pulsing in waves — another rarity. Probably Dad’s music, usually Dad’s music, otherwise 104.9 playing through the speakers, old rock and new rock and not-quite rock. Heat blasting until it was too warm with all those bodies and I pressed my forehead against the glass, watching my breath fog it up before dissipating again.
We drove until the road grew unfamiliar, a long stretch of darkness that seemed endless. I was convinced we were lost, stranded in the wilderness, surrounded by the unknown, until we pulled up to a Burger King, and the illusion shattered.
Streetlights lit up the vinyl seating and my knuckles gripping the oh-shit bar. Flickering signs illuminating the letters GER ING. The aroma of greasy fast food drifted through the driver's side windows, floating into my system and twisting with my building nausea. I wasn’t hungry and there was a headache slowly ice-picking it’s way at my temple and I was still reconciling the fact that we were going to a hospital to see my mother — there was nothing they could do, there was nothing they could do, there was nothing they could — but I knew if I didn’t eat, then the moment would suddenly become about me and I didn’t want that. So I picked something unimportant, nuggets and fries because it was small and Sprite because we weren’t allowed to have caffeinated soda.
Then, we drove again — until we didn’t.
Out the window, the dark sky bled watercolor onyx to navy, splattered with white stars and flickering airplanes — a backdrop to the hospital’s ominous lean, growing closer. We pulled up to a building I didn’t recognize but had been to before. The birthplace of my sister, a tiny alien baby swaddled in blood and blankets, a memory I wish I could reach as it danced at the edge of my mind. How poetic.
“We’re here,” someone says. Too quiet for our loud, too loud for the quiet.
There was nothing they could do.
No one moved — until we did.
Collectively, as if the pause was a silent agreement of sorts. We unloaded and made our way across the packed parking lot, past rows of idle cars and painted lines in pavement. My sister brushed her hand against my arm and I couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not, but I brushed it back. I was still waiting for someone to speak but the seal was closed tight, and I was too scared of breaking it to be the first.
We walked in through the wooden double doors, checked in with the professionally removed nurses, searching for the right room in the endless maze of sterile air and squeaky shoes against tile. The smell of antiseptic clung to my clothes as we entered and stayed when we left. I kept my eyes on the floor, counting how many tiles we passed as we walked before I lost track and restarted — what a horrible Christmas present, why couldn’t this have happened before break so I at least could’ve missed school for this, would kids at school be able to tell that my entire world has been changed — trying to ignore the spiral pulling me all directions.
I whispered the room number under my breath as we approached, Dad opening the door. I was momentarily frozen at the sight.
The room was devoid of doctors but filled with strangers — faces I knew but hadn’t seen in years, from my mother’s side of the family. She would’ve appreciated it, if she could’ve seen them, though it was painted with solemn faces too heavy to pretend we weren’t united by tragedy. Hugs were exchanged, pleasantries spoken, but I didn’t hear any of it, my eyes never straying from the bed.
My mother lay there, a soft blue sheet covering her, the steady beep of a breathing machine the only tether tying her to this Earth. Her body, unmoving except for the rise-fall-rise-fall of the manufactured breath. She was always a force — loud, charismatic, breaking down barriers with her laughter. She wasn’t supposed to be small, chest caving, eyes sunken, curls flattened.
Here is what I think about now:
My sister in the hospital, her face pale, sheet-white, glassy eyes, and shaky hands, an empty Benadryl bottle I forgot to take out of my pocket pressing against my thigh. In her face, my mother’s, a reflection of her entirely, including the way the fluorescent lights of the hospital room painted her in stark contrasts.
Dad with a clip on his finger, the television playing in the background, words like emergency surgery and appendicitis bouncing around in my head. The doctors said that if I hadn’t brought him to the 24-hour clinic, he would’ve died. It would’ve been a double whammy, I joked, in that cruel way, when there’s nothing left to say after the silence. Dad and Rachel laughed, at least. The doctor didn’t.
But then, all that came to mind was: This is it. This is it. This is it.
She was so close, within reach if I held out my arm, but she’d never felt so far away. The older I get, the further she drifts, a life raft lost in an endless ocean, drifting, drifting, and now I’d gotten to the center. I was never the anchor she needed, and looking at her now, I wished I could’ve been stronger.
A clog built up in my throat, my airways jammed. No air. No air. No air. Like instant death, one shot, then silence — surrounded by fake family, relying on a machine to breathe life.
There were stories exchanged. Things I never knew about my mother but desperately wanted to. Her bleaching her hair only to have it come out orange, her endless stories, her giving up everything for her kids, including her life. These anecdotes were distant, surely not about the mother I knew who couldn’t cook for herself and who had to use a walker.
They talked – I didn’t, mouth full of cotton, head full of fuzz – about how she would’ve loved a death as peaceful as her life. Which in hindsight, is humorous, considering the chaotic nature of it; five unplanned kids, an illness that invaded her brain, the abrupt end; but if there was one thing about my mother, it was that she loved a lot and she loved hard. The little moments in the too-big ones were what made it worth it for her and she never regretted how it turned out.
She could’ve passed easily, like Henry Wadsworth’s two ships in the night, there then gone, a ghost on St. Mark’s until dusk’s smearing horizon. A loud entrance, a silent exit. The kind granted to the most fulfilled of souls, the kind that proved that that faithless, Godless belief I still hold could be false, the kind that it the horizon. When she goes, she’ll fade so her essence fills the air before she’s really gone. A peaceful death, a peaceful funeral, for a woman who deserved a peaceful end.
I wish it ended like that.
Instead it ended like this:
A nurse coming in to inform Dad that we needed to say our goodbyes. The chord would be yanked, and then that would be it, one shot, bam you’re dead. There was no saving her, and they needed the extra bed, drunk Christmas accidents and all that. I wondered how many mothers were in the hospital at that moment, if they were any. Could we really be the only kids losing ours tonight?
"I know it's hard to hear, but there’s not much we can do."
There was nothing they could do.
They’d pull the plug. She’d drain away, lifeboat crushed under the ocean, the twisted end to that Grey’s Anatomy episode. Not reality. Not my reality.
Beep-beep-beeeep, slowing as the nurse asked, “Are you ready?” Are you ready? Are you ready to watch the only person who ever loved you without question cease to love you anymore? Are you ready for the world to end, over and over?
There wasn’t really an answer before the cutoff, silence wrapping the room in plastic too tight to breathe through. The stillness of her absence was suddenly too real — an endless grief with no end. It stretched on and on, filling the cracks in the tile with black tar, keeping us anchored in the same spot we were when we lost her.
Now, I’m left with nothing but fragments of unreliable memories, half-made up to comfort myself. I built her into the mother I wanted, not the mother she was, not the mother I needed. I still smell her in the sweet scent of boxed brownie mix, see her in my brother’s untamed hair, hear her when people say, You look so much like her. I carry her in the way I laugh too loudly, speak too fast. Even the parts of me I hate — I know they’re still hers, and I wouldn’t want to lose them. It would be like losing her all over again.
Sometimes I wonder if she ever thought about what I would be like without her. I’m still angry and faithless, holding onto an untethered rope. I wonder if she knew that I would be both the person who lost her and the person who would keep finding pieces of her scattered throughout everything I do — waiting for her like a dog at the door, catching her scent in places she no longer occupies. I wonder if she would still love me. I wonder if she would come back.
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