Sunset

I thought I’d rehearsed for this moment, but I hadn’t. You never can.

Photo by Igor Sporynin on Unsplash

It is 4:30 a.m. My phone is ringing.

I never sleep with my ringer on. It’s only on now because I’m scheduled to substitute teach at a school with an early start time.

At first I think my alarm is what’s waking me up. I don’t know why it’s going off; my body knows it’s too soon to be awake. I almost shut the phone down to make it stop, but then I realize the sound I’m hearing is not my alarm, but my ringtone: “Little Wonders” by Rob Thomas. The ringtone I’ve kept for over sixteen years.

Our lives are made in these small hours…

Rolling over to pick up my phone, I see the name of my hometown on the caller ID, and my heart stops. My eyes snap all the way open as I swipe my finger across the phone’s screen to answer the call.

“Hi, is this Erin O’Brien?” a cheerful voice in the phone asks me.

I answer yes. I’m still groggy, but I can feel the adrenaline rush building.

“Hold please!”

She is gone before I can say another word.

After what feels like an eternity, I hear a click and a male voice on the other end of the line. He tells me he is a doctor. He says and spells his name, which I immediately forget.

He wants to know if I’m aware my mom is in the emergency room.

I am not. I live in a different city, I explain.

“Well, Judy came in a few hours ago,” he tells me, “having a lot of trouble breathing…”

Oh. Okay, I think, exhaling as he continues to speak. She’s in the emergency room and they’re calling to give me an update on her condition –

“…that Judy has died…”

Has died.

Has died.

I hear myself stammering “What? What?” in exactly the same way I did when I learned of my sister’s death almost twenty years ago, also via phone call.

And now suddenly I am outside my body, studying myself, observing curiously. I note that even as the logical voice in my head begins to tell me that this is real, the feeling part of me hasn’t caught up yet and is still repeating “What?” over and over again.

I remember the other call, the one from 2007, the one where I dropped the blue landline phone’s receiver onto the floor as I slid down, my back against the wall, and screamed.

I was the one who had dialed the phone that time, asking to speak to my sister. I remember how the words my brother-in-law spoke on that call – “Didn’t your mom tell you? Laurel died this morning” – made it sound incongruously as if the dying had been an action, something she did, although it turned out she died in her sleep. Her last action had been going upstairs to take a nap, not knowing she wouldn’t wake up.

This time, I notice the opposite effect: how the doctor’s phrasing removes my mom from the action, even though he is telling me now that she died struggling, struggling to breathe, in a place whose raison d’être is keeping people alive.

Only hours later will I begin to process the fact that she was alive, and lucid, for nearly two hours in that emergency room while no one called me.

They had my number. My ringer was on. I would have answered.

I find myself sitting on an uncomfortable chair in my kitchen, one of the chairs left there by my home’s previous owner along with the ugly table I keep meaning to remove but haven’t yet, because it’s always covered with stuff and I have nothing with which to replace it.

I am gripping the phone like it’s a rope I’m hanging from by one hand. My other arm is wrapped around my chest. I can feel myself rocking back and forth against the chair.

My ex-husband, who still lives in my home’s spare bedroom, is awake in the kitchen. He sleeps very little and has been awake for several hours. Now he is standing in front of me, standing over me, and I can hear him asking me what’s happening as I stammer my responses to the doctor.

I don’t pause to answer my ex-husband’s questions. Although he continues to ask, I can see in my peripheral vision that he already knows.

The doctor is telling me that he asked my mom if she wanted to be resuscitated, and she said no. He asked her twice. When he reminded her that just a week ago she had told him otherwise, she said, I understand.

He is telling me he thinks she knew she was dying. He wants me to know that bringing her back would have been a violent process. It seems very important to him to make this clear to me.

I thank him. It feels like I should thank him.

He tells me how long he has been caring for my mom, tells me about her medical history, tells me she knew him, he wasn’t a stranger to her. He tells me he held her hand and talked to her until she died. He tells me how very sorry he is and asks me if I’m okay.

I can feel his sincerity, but I have no idea how to respond. I’m just waiting for him to finish so I can hang up the phone. I’m thinking, we can talk more about all of that later. I can’t stand one more second of being on the phone right now.

When he pauses, I ask him: What do I need to do?

Nothing, he says. There is nothing you need to do now. The coroner will contact you.

I don’t hear whatever he says after that.

After I hang up I realize we will not talk more about it later. We will not talk again, at all, because there is no reason to. I didn’t need to try to remember his name.

I believe that later I will recall every detail of what happens next, but I won’t. I will remember moments between blurry montages, as if someone were randomly fast-forwarding and pausing my brain.

I cancel my substitute teaching jobs for the rest of the week. My older son stumbles to the bathroom, barely conscious. He doesn’t seem to notice that I’m uncharacteristically awake and sitting in the kitchen. I think about stopping him as he walks back to bed, but I decide not to say anything to him just yet.

Eventually, I cry. It’s the strained kind of crying that feels like work. It hurts to force it out, but I feel compelled to. I imagine it’s similar in some way to the experience of pushing out a baby. I don’t know for sure, though. That’s something I never got to do.

At some point my ex-husband puts coffee in front of me. It’s starting to get cold by the time I take a sip.

I keep returning to the doctor’s words: Judy has died. I replay them again and again in my mind, trying to capture and hold the half-heartbeat between the words “Judy” and “has died”.

Eventually I realize that what I’m looking for is the moment just before she died to me, the instant before Schrödinger’s box opened and the outcome was set, as if I could force a different ending if only I could insert my will into that moment.

My mom was in the emergency room for almost two hours, awake and talking to the doctor, while I was asleep with my phone next to me, ringer on, volume all the way up.

Why did they not call me. Why did she not ask them to call me?

It’s around 9 a.m. when I call the coroner. He must have noticed my name on caller ID because he asks me if I’m calling about Judy O’Brien.

When I tell him that I am, he asks how I knew, and I tell him the hospital contacted me several hours ago.

He says they told him they didn’t have my contact information. He was in the process of trying to find someone who could give him a number for me when he got my call.

I tell him there has been some confusion with the hospital regarding my mom’s allowed contacts. She had given them my brother-in-law’s name and number during a previous admission. He still lives in her house, whereas I travel frequently.

Someone at the hospital had misinterpreted my mom’s choosing my brother-in-law as the primary contact to mean that I was not to be given any information.

I thought we had resolved the issue months ago. My mom told me she had asked the hospital to communicate with me about her care. Apparently, no one updated the notes in their system.

I can almost feel the coroner shaking his head. He tells me, “They should have called you when she came in. You could have had a chance to say goodbye.”

I am so grateful for his supportive indignance, but it breaks me. Finally my tears flow freely, effortlessly. I couldn’t stop them if I tried.

The stranger on the other end of the line is so kind it kills me. I tell him I have never done this before. I don’t know what to do next.

He gives me his personal cell phone number. He tells me that I am in control of what happens next, that I don’t need to rush. I should choose a funeral home, but he can wait up to a week for me to get back to him. My mom is – was – 82 years old with a well-documented medical history. There won’t be an autopsy.

I’m grateful for that. I’ve seen the aftermath of an autopsy and I never want to see it again.

He gives me his personal cell phone number and tells me how sorry he is, and I realize how uncomfortable it makes me to be on the receiving end of sympathy. I am usually the one others turn to for support.

I text my husband in Cuba to tell him what has happened. The cell phone signal comes and goes there, so I have no idea when he’ll see my message. I know Jesus will be devastated. He was determined to meet my mom in person, but the closest they ever came was a phone conversation on speaker, with me translating.

Jesus knows about my complicated relationship with my mom. He always wanted to help. He could have, if he’d had the chance. He is the first person who has ever made me feel loved, fully and unconditionally, exactly as I am. I know he would have loved my mom the same way.

I had planned to install WhatsApp on my mom’s phone and set up an account for her before my next trip. I so wanted her and Jesus to be able to talk face to face. I don’t know why I didn’t think to do it sooner.

Jesus video calls me as soon as he sees my message. He is sobbing. It’s agonizing, not being able to reach through the screen to touch him.

It doesn’t matter that he hardly knew my mom, that he didn’t get to meet her in person. He loved her completely because she was connected to me.

But I also know that he isn’t just crying for my mother. He’s crying for his own, who died just over a year ago, and also for his aunt Mariana who lived next door to him most of his life and died in January, and for the fact that he and I can’t be in the same place together to lean on each other in our grief.

Eventually my two kids who are at home wake up, and I tell them. They are sad and concerned about me. They sit in the living room on the couch on either side of me and we watch something we all enjoy, although later I won’t remember what it was.

I text my younger son, keeping my tone deliberately casual so he doesn’t have to imagine every terrible possibility before he has a chance to call me. He’s walking to class when he responds. I am heartbroken that I can’t tell him in person.

A momentary wave of relief washes over me when he asks if we can come and get him. It’s almost finals week, but it’s a Wednesday, and he doesn’t have class on Thursdays.

Although I was careful not to pressure him one way or another, I want him at home.

I know my children’s feelings will not be as layered or complex as mine. They are removed by an additional generation, and the death of an elderly grandparent is within the natural order of life.

My children only knew one version of my mom. I, on the other hand, am grieving many versions of her – some that existed, and others that never will.

My older son and I travel to Valparaiso in silence. It’s one of my favorite drives, an extension of a trip we’ve been making for years – every fall since he, now 24, was a toddler – to visit an apple orchard in Hobart. I have twenty years of pictures of my kids standing in front of the apple-adorned plywood height-measuring sign that’s nailed to a tree in the petting zoo. I stopped with the pictures a few years ago when it was clear my daughter, my youngest child, was done growing.

As we drive past the exit for the orchard, I find myself wishing I had continued taking the pictures anyway.

Somewhere between Gary and Valparaiso we turn the radio on. It’s set to The Bridge on Sirius XM. Seventies and eighties light rock. The music of my childhood.

I make it through ELO’s “Telephone Line” and Carole King’s “So Far Away”, but when I see John Denver’s name pop up on the screen as the opening notes of “Rocky Mountain High” begin to play, I can no longer maintain my composure.

I can’t even fly over the Rockies without crying. I have only seen the mountains from the ground once since my family’s last visit twenty-nine years ago, six months after my Aunt Rita’s funeral, which took place on my 27^th birthday.

My most consistently happy childhood memories reside in those mountains.

Other than that one last trip after my aunt’s death, we never returned, never went skiing again. I will never forget the look on my mom’s face as we boarded the train back to Illinois after her sister’s funeral, how I reached out to try to comfort her, how she pushed me away and said she just wanted to be left alone.

My son offers to change the station, but I tell him no. I want to let the song play.

We arrive at the college, park the car, and wait for my younger son to return from class. I step out to hug him when he appears. He holds on for a long time before he lets go.

As we drive home, he occasionally reaches for me, silently placing a hand on my arm from the back seat when he hears my breathing change. I stare out the window at the marshy swales that border the southern curve of Lake Michigan, and my mind drifts back to another memory.

It was early June, one of those glorious pre-Fourth of July evenings when I could relax because there was still so much summer standing between me and the start of the next school year.

My dad was out of town. He was a salesman with a multi-state territory, and his business travels were frequent enough that I had given up trying to keep track of where he was going or when he would be back.

I was twelve years old, Laurel almost ten. My mom seldom cooked when it was just the three of us, relying on tv dinners or whatever could be thrown in a microwave, but this was one of the rare evenings she prepared a full meal in my dad’s absence. I don’t remember what we ate. I just remember the anomalous, warm feeling of the three of us sitting down to share dinner together.

When we finished, my mom asked us if we wanted to go with her to a farm where she had promised to take care of the animals for a friend who was out of town. We eagerly agreed to go, grabbing our firefly nets on the way out the door. An antique store on Main Street had a side gig selling fireflies, supposedly for medical research. They provided us with large, cone-shaped cotton nets and paid us a penny per firefly for whatever we could catch. By August I would have a fat stack of bills to spend at the county fair.

We rode past the outskirts of town as the evening light was starting to fade. Taking advantage of my spot in the truck’s front seat, I rolled the window down so I could feel the air pushing against my face as we accelerated on the flat country road. I stared into the passenger side rear view mirror, the wind whipping my hair back, the cornfields and trees and occasional houses an indistinct blur behind the fixed image of my own reflection.

After a short stretch of gravel road we turned onto a circular driveway, parking next to the open pasture between the house and the fenced enclosure where several horses were grazing. The fireflies were just beginning to appear. My sister and I jumped out of the truck with our nets and started chasing after them as my mom let herself into the house.

We ran back and forth through the open field, jumping and twirling our nets in wide circles to keep the already-caught fireflies from escaping while we chased new ones. I had never caught so many at once. I did the math and figured that in half an hour I’d have at least a hundred of them, a whole dollar, maybe more.

It was the kind of perfect summer night that feels like it might never end. The sky looked like the inside of a blown glass paperweight, unmarred by a single cloud. The air was pleasantly warm and absolutely still. The only sounds came from our own voices, the thrumming of cicadas and crickets, a faint train whistle in the distance. As the sun dipped below the horizon, leaving behind bands of orange fading into cobalt, I looked over and saw my mom leaning against the truck, watching us.

I was used to seeing my mom working on projects, solving crossword puzzles, playing solitaire, eating while reading a magazine with the tv on in the background. I almost never saw her just be still. But in that moment, she was simply standing with her arms folded across her chest, looking out over the pasture and smiling.

I looked away quickly, not wanting to catch her eye and break the spell.

Laurel was still dashing in circles on the other side of the field. As I turned to run toward her something made me hesitate, my breath catching in my throat. I froze the moment in my mind, capturing every detail of it in the time it took to blink. I had the eerie sense that I was watching my future self watch myself in the past.

And then I was running again, running toward my sister, running toward my mom, and even though I was running I was absolutely certain that I was leaving some part of me behind in that field, forever twirling and chasing fireflies in the summer sunset.

Photo by Rajesh Rajput on Unsplash

This post was originally published on Erin O’Brien’s Substack, My Jellyfish Life. If you enjoyed reading it, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber!