How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  I can’t remember if the three of us ever sat at that table together. I didn’t have my mother’s talent for bringing the family together, soothing us into enjoying one another’s company despite ourselves.

  Now, after visiting my mother in the hospital, I sat at the table in my grandmother’s kitchen because no other part of her house was safe. When we first got to her house, I found her sitting in her favorite chair.

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Hey, Grandma.”

  I bent down to hug her, kissed her on the cheek. We didn’t say much; there wasn’t much I felt I could say. I didn’t want to tell her that her daughter was having seizures while in a coma. My grandmother used to be a nurse; she would know if I were lying about how Mom was doing. I wasn’t ready to admit out loud how useless I felt standing beside the sleeping woman.

  Instead, Grandma latched on to my uncle, barraging him with questions about where people were and what was happening and what we were going to eat and why hadn’t so-and-so returned her call and where was the charger for her cell phone. Being in the same room with her felt like trying to push two magnets together from the wrong ends. A mother terribly worried about her daughter, a son terribly worried about his mother, in wholly incompatible ways.

  Retreating to the edge of the living room, I noticed then that she still had mirrors all over the walls. They broke up our bodies and handed them back to us piecemeal.

  I decided that I should take a nap and leave the others to themselves.

  The moment I opened the guest bedroom’s door, I realized my mistake. My mother’s open suitcase was at the foot of the bed. Of course. She always stayed here when she came to visit.

  I froze mid-step, then I closed the door behind me. On the nightstand, a clear plastic bag held the shredded remnants of the dress doctors must have had to cut my mother out of, some of the bracelets she always wore, and her wallet. I sat the bag down and climbed onto the bed, blinking back tears. One at a time, I grabbed the pillows, pressing my face into them until I found the smell of her hair. I found my mother there, briefly, her perfume mixed with the burn of a curling iron. I held my face against that pillow and screamed.

  Before I opened the door and walked out again, I paused to wipe my face. When I put my hand on the doorknob, I thought about her hand touching this very same knob only the day before and I turned to fog again, a wispy almost-man drifting through my grandmother’s house, past mirrors that could no longer see me, until I made it back into the kitchen. I sat at the table, staring at nothing until my uncle walked in.

  “I can’t sleep here,” I said, quietly so my grandmother wouldn’t hear me. He nodded.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up in a twin bed in a room filled with trophies, basketballs, and track cleats. For a moment, I felt like I’d left one dream only to wake up in another. Then I remembered. I stared at the ceiling as the rest of the previous day’s memories seeped back into me like an IV drip. This happened every morning for the next few days. Sunlight or my uncle’s voice from the doorway would wake me up, I’d smile, bemused to be sleeping in a bed with sports-themed sheets, and then: “Oh, right.”

  Downstairs, my uncle would tell me to eat and I would eat. He would tell me it was time for us to go to the hospital and we’d go. Sometimes we’d stop by my grandmother’s house to pick her or another relative up. Sometimes we’d just go straight there. My mother didn’t have any more seizures. It got easier to talk to her. It also got easier for me to comfortably sit in the corner of her room, chanting nam-myoho-renge-kyo with a clear voice. I hoped, as the sons of sleeping women always do, that she heard my voice. Sometimes I’d realize my chanting was falling into the same rhythm as the beeping machines monitoring her and I would stop. I didn’t like the idea of my prayers being encased in a rhythm that I couldn’t control. Eventually, a nurse would stop by the room to check on her. Occasionally, we’d see the doctor himself, but his visits rarely brought new news or comfort. Nothing had changed. Uncle would then say it was time to go or time to eat or time to make phone calls and I’d do it and I’d do it and I’d do it.

  Outside of the routine of my uncle’s gentle orders, I couldn’t trust myself to stay myself so I tried my best to stay in step. We slipped into a forced waltz, unsure what would happen if either of us ever stopped. People started to arrive. My mom’s sister from California, my mom’s best friend from Ohio. Sometimes people came because I had called them myself but by the time they showed up, a few hours or a day later, I’d have no memory of having done so. We’d drive from house to house. We’d make more calls. I would walk my cousin’s dog so I’d have an excuse to avoid sitting in the living room with my family. I’d sit at this kitchen table or that kitchen table until my uncle would find me staring off into space and tell me I needed to go to sleep. There was nothing to do but wait. The food, the calls, the houses, the tables, the nurses, the coma, the dog, the dreams. Then the doctor said we were running out of options. He pulled charts and brain scans out of a folder. As he spoke, I latched on to what little I could. The trauma of her brain going so long without oxygen had been devastating. The doctor was hoping to see some flicker of activity, proof that the brain was starting to recover.

  My uncle walked over to the bed, took my mother’s hand, and leaned toward her ear to whisper. “Carol Jean,” he said, softly but firmly, a brother encouraging his baby sister, “I know you can hear me. There is a light somewhere in you and I need you to reach out and hold on to it. I know it’s there and I know you can find it. I just need you to reach out and hold on to it, okay?”

  * * *

  MORE PEOPLE ARRIVED. Extended family members I hadn’t seen in years, longtime friends and coworkers of my mother, people who had first taught her about Buddhism when she was in her twenties. As more friends and family members arrived, the comfort of their presence was cut through by the fact that their arrival was proof that the situation was worsening.

  Beyond the initial greeting—gentle smile, hug, and “It’s so good to see you”—I wasn’t much use. The hospital visits—usually twice a day—seemed to bend time. Our hours revolved around the woman in that bed. Every bite of food, every song fizzling on my grandmother’s old radio. Every conversation, however silly or pleasant, was being had now because of something my mother’s heart had set in motion. My family visited her in different combinations. Sometimes my grandmother would sit in the chair by the window, bouncing her leg. Sometimes I would chant alone by the bed; other times friends of my mother would join me. During one visit, several nurses stepped into the room to say hello. I thought one of them looked new. Maybe she had switched shifts with one of the regulars. She was a short black woman with brochures in her hand.

  “Is it okay if we speak for a moment?” she said to the room. Everyone made eye contact with one another and then shuffled into the hallway. The Buddhist friends who had first taught my mother how to chant stayed behind in the room and kept chanting quietly.

  The nurse I didn’t recognize guided us into a little room I hadn’t seen before. It had fake stained-glass windows even though the room actually had no windows. I know the doctor was the one to say it, but I have no memory of hearing the words “brain dead” for the first time. As my memory tells it, when I walked into that tiny room, I had a mother and when I walked out, I didn’t.

  19MAY 2011

  MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

  As soon as I was old enough to learn what cigarette smoking did to the body, I started wondering how my mother would end. Sometimes I would try to picture a dark, tobacco-scented flower blossoming in one of her lungs, then another and another, just like the cancer that had killed my grandfather. Maybe the flowers would die off one winter, only to return the following spring. It would be awful, I was sure, but it would be slow. We would have time to say goodbye. We’d watch the season change together.

  The sun had gone down by the time we made it back to my uncle’s home. One by one, we stepped out of the SUV, red-eyed, exhausted
into silence. We held hands a moment longer than usual, patting one another’s shoulders or hugging again, before slowly separating. I said that I was going to take the dog for a walk, then left the dog inside and walked out into the dark alone. I realized now that I’d taken to walking the dog several times a day because that’s exactly what Mom would’ve done if she had been here.

  The air was noisy with crickets chirping and leaves rustling in the breeze. With my eyes closed, all the trees shifting in the night sounded like faraway ocean waves. I walked slowly down the long, gravel driveway between the house and the road. About halfway, I fell to my knees. I ran my hands through the dirt, pushing the stones, then pulling them back in handfuls as my tears stained them. It didn’t matter how I acted anymore.

  A friend told me once that after her father died, she cried so intensely, a blood vessel in one of her eyes burst. It had seemed like an impossible marvel when she told me at the time, but now I knew. Tears don’t always just fall; sometimes they rip through you, like storm-painted gusts instead of mere raindrops.

  * * *

  THERE WERE SO many stories about my mother I’d never heard, or rather: my mother had so many stories I’d never thought to ask her to share. Her sister told us, one of those afternoons, that when Mom was a teenager, she plastered an entire side of their bedroom with Jackson 5 posters. She wrote each of them fan letters and then wrote a novel about a black girl who happens to bump into the group on the street in Beverly Hills and is whisked off into a love story with a teenage Michael.

  “Here it is,” my grandmother said, walking back into the living room with an old spiral notebook in her hands. Running my fingers over the pages, it wasn’t the words so much as the handwriting itself that got me. My mother wrote in a kind of hybrid cursive, a flowing script that reminded me of the sketches fashion designers use to plan their collections. Then I remembered the notes she’d put in my lunch box every day in elementary school. Short one- or two-sentence messages written in that flowing script. I always ate the dessert snack and threw away the sandwich, glaring at the lunch lady lording over the trash cans as she threatened to tell my mother. I couldn’t remember what I did with those notes—if I shoved them into my pockets, if I dumped them in the trash too. Why hadn’t I kept them? A good son would’ve kept them. I had so little of her handwriting left now.

  Stop, I’d eventually have to tell myself, just stop. I handed the notebook back to my grandmother. The past was a siren song, offering to give my mother back if I dared to make stories about her my sustenance. Whenever I tried, however, I quickly found myself dragged under by a riptide. A story became a memory became a guilt-laced question before finally, there at the bottom of the sea, I’d find the same fact waiting for me: I was never going to see her again. To avoid the lure of memories, I threw myself into the work of planning to bury her.

  My uncle Albert is good with death. When my grandfather died, Albert guided my grandmother and the rest of the family through the countless decisions that have to be made in order to put a loved one to rest. Over the years, he had stepped into this role over and over again without complaint. Throughout the time my mother was in a coma and then, during the flurry of errands leading up to her funeral, my uncle was the easiest person for me to be with.

  In a family of mostly women, I had never expected to be the kind of man who fled their company, relieved to just sit in silence with my uncle. He didn’t ask how I felt, but he would hug me or put his hand on my shoulder at the precise moment I needed to be comforted, just before I realized it myself. He seemed to thrive on creating a sense of order, on understanding the tasks to be taken care of. We turned the dining room into a command center. Armed with yellow pads and lists of phone numbers, we took turns calling insurance companies and banks, deciding on fonts for the funeral program and guest lists. I would stay at that table, making phone calls and checking off “to do” items as late as he would let me.

  After nearly a decade of barely speaking with him, I realized that my relationship with my uncle had somehow remained intact. Maybe this is why, in the depths of her unconscious fears, Mom had always called out for him in her sleep. She knew that he was steadfast. This was the uncle who, when I was eleven or twelve, took me aside and said, “In some tribes, when you turn thirteen, you are a real man. It’s time to start thinking like a real man.” As I was sitting cross-legged on a carpet littered with action figures, I realized what he said to me then had repulsed me. “Real men” scared me. I didn’t want to be one. Now, in my midtwenties, planning my mother’s funeral, I understood what he’d meant. It didn’t matter whether “man” was the word best suited for who I had become. What mattered was the other word. I felt more real, more like myself, than I ever had before. There were no more masks left for me to hide behind.

  Sitting in the passenger seat of his SUV as my uncle drove us to the grocery store, it occurred to me that we were now two of the oldest men in our immediate family. And then, somehow that thought led to another one so I spoke up.

  “Uncle, I’m gay,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road ahead of us. “I guess I’ve never actually said it to you.”

  “Oh, I know,” he answered, his eyes also steady on the road. His tone wasn’t dismissive or heavy; it was simply his, that calm directness that made it clear why he was so good at being the father of a large family, a deacon at his church, and a senior executive at his company.

  “It doesn’t really seem to matter much now, to be honest, but I just wanted to say it.”

  “Okay, nephew.” He smiled. I went back to watching the trees blur as we sped past them.

  At the grocery store, I held up two different packages of hot dog buns, trying to decide, while he picked up a bag of chips. When my uncle turned his back to me, I looked at him and then almost cried thinking of his smile.

  * * *

  WHEN YOUR MOTHER is a single parent and you are her only child and she doesn’t have a will, if she dies in the state of Tennessee, you are designated as the next of kin. I heard the term “next of kin” crackling on the other end of phone lines for weeks, then I started seeing “next of kin” on paperwork from lawyers, banks, clerk’s offices, and the morgue. As next of kin, it had fallen to me, a few days before the funeral, to call the insurance company and tell the woman how much the ceremony we had planned would cost. She was only allowed to tell me whether the policy could cover that amount, and she said matter-of-factly that it could. I paused, hoping that she would at least give me a hint of whether we could afford a nicer funeral service—maybe the casket with rose-gold handles instead of brass, or a more extravagant floral arrangement? But the insurance agent answered my silence with a steelier silence and I finally said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

  I told my uncle that we were in the clear and immediately began to wonder about the number the woman must have been staring at on her computer screen. Was it too late to find out if I could buy my mother a designer gown to be buried in? It seemed cruel to have so little information on which to decide exactly how we would say goodbye to her. But I felt my uncle patting my shoulder with a light squeeze and tried to remember to be grateful. At least we weren’t going into debt to give my mother a proper funeral.

  The day before the service, standing in the funeral home’s hallway, my uncle handed me his phone so I could plead with a florist to accept a last-minute order of sunflowers. “They were her favorite,” I said. “She’d buy them at the grocery store when she could and keep them in a vase on the kitchen counter.” I was ashamed at how quickly my voice would devolve into cracked stutters and babbled memories. “Can you do this for her, please?” The woman on the other end of the line, likely staring at an entire list of funeral arrangement orders, sighed and agreed.

  We had a traditional Buddhist ceremony and then a secular service. The sunflowers calmed me, so I looked at them whenever I felt tears or memories begin to take hold. As we were chanting, I looked over at my grandmother. She kept her head bowed, perhaps praying her ow
n prayers. I felt grateful, then, that she had allowed me—and her daughter—this grace. Halfway through the service, one of my aunts sang “The Wind Beneath My Wings” to comfort my grandmother. My mother’s best friend read Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” at my request. After I finished chanting, I stared at the flowers until it was time for me to deliver the eulogy. I walked to the podium, looked at the crowded room, and started speaking. Like a prayer I’d been chanting day and night for weeks, I could feel the words leaving my mouth but I couldn’t hear them.

  At the cemetery, we stood under a white gazebo. I kept my eyes straight ahead and walked slowly, first behind my mother’s casket, then behind my family as we left the casket behind. It was so bright outside, a spring day so beautiful it seemed rude given the circumstances. I followed my grandmother as we stepped out of the gazebo and into the sunlight. She had been mostly silent all day, but now she threw back her head. “My baby girl,” she cried. “That was my baby girl.” She had to lean on someone for support, but I can only picture who it wasn’t.

  20JUNE 2011

  JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

  Back in Jersey City, I took a breath and reached into the mailbox. Lately, I’d been able to make it through most days at work without crying, but every time I got home I would find a pile of envelopes addressed to my mother, and the tears would have me gasping for air before I could make it inside my apartment.

  This time, though, I found an envelope with an insurance company’s logo on it addressed to me. I took a breath, then ripped it open, unfolding what turned out to be a life insurance statement. I started blinking, trying as best I could to see the number before the tears already pooling in my eyes rendered every digit a blur. I stepped into my building and held my hand over my mouth. The force of the scream made me double over as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I’d been told to expect a check, but nothing could have prepared me for the amount printed on the dotted line.