The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote

Four years ago this past March, she had a stroke in her own kitchen on a Tuesday morning while she was waiting for her coffee to finish, and when I found her on the floor her right side would not answer her anymore. The hospital in Wausau kept her nine days. When she came home, she came home different, and somebody had to be there every day, because a house with stairs and a stove and a woman who refused, refused, to use her cane in her own kitchen is not a house you leave a stroke patient alone in.

I was the one who was there.

I remember a Tuesday in the second winter, a bad one, when Mama’s blood pressure dropped while she was standing at the sink and she went down hard against the cabinet, not a fall exactly, more of a slow slide, and by the time I got there (I had a key, I always had a key) she was sitting on the kitchen floor with her housecoat twisted around her and her glasses knocked sideways, furious at herself more than hurt.

“Don’t you call an ambulance,” she said, before I even had my coat off. “I am not paying four hundred dollars to ride six blocks.”

“Mama, you could have broken a hip.”

“I didn’t break anything. Help me up and get me my coffee before it’s stone cold.”

I did not call the ambulance. I got her up, checked her over the way the home health nurse, a steady woman named Pam Garrity, had taught me to check a person after a fall, and I made her a fresh pot of coffee, and I sat with her at that table for forty minutes after, just in case, pretending to read the paper while I watched her out of the corner of my eye. That was most of what the four years were. Not one dramatic rescue. Forty minutes at a kitchen table, over and over, watching out of the corner of your eye, because the people you love do not always let you watch them head on.

I do not say any of this to make a case against my brother. I say it because it is simply what happened, the way weather happens, the way the seasons turn whether you are ready for them or not. I lived twelve minutes from Mama’s house. Greg lived three hours south, outside Madison, where he worked for an engineering firm and had, as he reminded me more than once, a job that did not let him just pick up and leave whenever.