Until Now

So as simply as I could, I said to my mother, "I've found a driver for you." In return, she had merely nodded. There was not the slightest change in her far-off expression. Plainly, my mother had taken over my grandmother's throne. The couch.

With every ounce of my mother's independence gone, darkness had gradually possessed what endurance she had left. I had likened the process to a sneaky Solar Eclipse. I have often asked myself how could I have missed seeing those shapes and shades of shadows overtaking her.

What was it that had taken my attention away from noticing how each newly arrived day had openly displayed different parts of my mother's nature? How could I not have seen the ways in which those overclouds had indefinably altered her reality forever after? Perhaps it was because I had been so busy coloring in the outlines of my world with your love. Perhaps I had not realized my mother was dying. Perhaps I was in denial. Perhaps . . . perhaps . . . perhaps.

Unlooked for memories have always tugged at my heart until, at last, I comprehend the meaning of what my mother had said to me when I believed I was almost grownup, "You will understand when you are older."

You may think I have some left-over open and yet to be shut issues. I suppose I might.

Who doesn't? Although I had decided twenty years ago that issues are a waste of time, it seems I do have one life side-effect left to rid myself of before I leave.

I don't even recall how, or for that matter when it was, I had informed you that my mother's soul was ready to set itself free. Liberated from being held a prisoner within her body.

I ever so faintly recall that our telegrams had crossed the ocean within days, of one another's.

Mine had spoken of my mother's dying, and yours had wrapped me in an invisible cloak of love and empathy. You had also alerted me that Uncle Sam had pointed his longer than normal forefinger at you. We had both known that World War II was going to take tolls at home and abroad. Pinpoints of recollections are like once upon a memory. Can it be that my digitizer has become so obsolete that my past and present have been thrown together in a blender? I think so.

But on that day, you know, the day the atomic bomb had dropped on Japan . . . I will never forget that was when my mother's mind had disentangled enough to come back to itself.

Her magician's slight of hand had caught me unaware. Out of the corner of my eye I had watched it inch toward me as I sat next to her, motionless. Said nothing. Then, when she had at long last touched me, I froze even deeper. Pure out and out internalized panic had flooded through my mind and body, then iced over. Why? I suppose it was the way she had walked her delicately tapered fingers over my face and then stopped when she had reached the reddish star-shaped birthmark. Next thing I knew, she had begun to gently trace its shape. A compulsion of hers since I was born. The silence had tried to communicate with me, talk to the spot. You know the spot-that mark on my right cheek; the one I had always found a way to carefully cover over with a light pancake powder. The spot I had hoped my mother would forget about and no one else would notice.