Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Machinery (6)

(1980)

She sits in the hospital room.

She looks at her father.

She looks down at her mother.

Is this what you'll be like, when I see you in heaven, or wherever it is we go? Or will you appear to me as you did on my wedding day? Will I weep again with joy when you smile at me? Will our loved ones be gathered around us? Will you be older? Will you be what you are right now, this husk of bones? (No!) Will you somehow be all of these things, as you are even now in my mind? How will we give and receive love? Will I recognize you at all?

She hears the priest's voice, speaking at her daughter's baptism. We are all equals in the eyes of God. Yes. We are all created in the image of our Father. No. I want to know you and recognize you. I don't want to forget these things.

She reaches down for her rosary beads. She looks back at her mother, supine and stationary. Suddenly the practical, practiced faith and belief in the goodness of human beings that has stood her through every test-her ability to love a salve against the iniquities and injustices of this life, the solicitudes of raising her own children, the faith that has made her life meaningful, the conviction that she understands what caring entails-is revealing itself, abandoning her in the eyes of the mother she loves, whose life is slipping away. Her faith has always comforted her, giving courage and belief. Now, for the first time, it occurs to her that faith will not be enough because it's all for naught if nothing else remains. Anything but nothingness, she thinks. Just darkness and nothingness, not that...

Is she trying to move?

She watches her mother's eyes become still and focused as she shifts slightly, a shadow beneath the sagging sheets.

Is she trying to speak? Is she praying?

"We're here...can you see us?"

Her lips move but no sound comes out.

She looks eagerly at her mother's face, as though in that moment it might still be possible to will her to rise. To help her stand beside the bed so she can tell them everything will be all right, as she always has. To help them believe.

Then, suddenly, she realizes: She's waiting for us to say it's okay.

"It's okay," her father is saying. "We're okay, you can go..."

Her mother opens her eyes and looks up, as if trying to communicate something she's already seeing. The eyes close, open, and then-still.

She looks into those eyes and then, in spite of herself, she finds herself looking upward, expecting to see her mother. Not the pale, lifeless shell on the bed, the real presence, ascending up and out of the room, a shimmering trail reflected in the sun's light like stained glass, consoling them all one last time.