My sister’s
sobbing spun me backwards five years.
My sister, my brother,
and I heard the siren wail down our street. Then my mother stopped breathing.
My sister knelt on the floor and sobbed as she watched our brother start
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Panicked, I ran to yell at the firemen, “Oxygen,
bring oxygen quickly!” Tall, muscular men in heavy black boots and clanking
belts moved in slow motion to fill the bedroom and squeeze us out. When they
wheeled the gurney through the front door a few minutes later, an oxygen mask
wheezed over my mother’s face. But they could do nothing to bring her back. She
was dead of a heart attack at fifty-three.
About a year after my
mother died, I realized I was losing the visual image of her face. I could
remember the bend of her nose, the dimple in her cheek, and the small gap in
her teeth when she smiled, but I couldn’t pull it all together. Because looking
at photographs of her could reduce me to tears, I had put them all away. I had
been so intent on avoiding the pain of remembering her that I could no longer
visualize clearly what she looked like. Worried, I pulled out the last pictures
we had taken of her, spread them out on the kitchen table, and looked at them
carefully—the black and white Christmas card picture and the colored ones taken
under a tree outside. Relief and pain surged through me as I stared at her
familiar face. I didn’t want to forget her, not just the way her cheek felt
when I kissed her, or the way her voice rose when she laughed, but also the way
her whole face shone as she smiled. My children would never know her, but I
held in my hand physical evidence of her existence, photographs to go with the
stories.
I brought those
photographs with me to Italy and placed them where we could see them as we
fussed and laughed and worried through our days. We were being shaped by those
days, by those moments that we lived at Gabi. But as we began that New Year, I
kept those pictures nearby to remind us of our source.
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