DURING THE YEAR OF marriage and subsequent few years, the experience with Chuck aged my mother by a decade. She held herself differently and sang very rarely. She didn’t lose her omnipresent sense of humor entirely, but it was subdued and muted like an old, torn blanket thrown over a once colorful couch.

I was too busy with my own life to pay much attention to what was going on in hers. After her short stint as a convenience store clerk and manager, she quickly sold the business at a loss to raise cash. Then she went back to what was comfortable for her as a teller at another bank.

Two years later, again while I was in the kitchen eating breakfast, she entered from her bedroom looking disheveled and mumbling something about what a tremendous headache she had. I was accustomed to her complaining occasionally about headaches, but they usually subsided after a dose of aspirin. I always chalked these up to her blue eyes unable to handle the bright sunshine of Phoenix summers. She grabbed an aspirin from the cabinet and glass of orange juice, then proceeded back to her bedroom.

About forty minutes later, after readying myself to get to classes, I was headed out the door when the phone rang.

“Hello,” the man’s voice said. “Can I speak with your mother?”

“Sure,” I replied. “She’s in her bedroom. Can I tell her who’s calling?”

“Yes, it’s Eddie from the savings and loan. She was supposed to come in this morning, and we haven’t seen her yet. I don’t remember her asking for the day off, so I just want to be sure nothing happened along the way.”

“Okay. Let me get her. There’s an extension in her room and she can pick up there.”

I set the phone down and ran down the hallway to knock on her door. No answer. A louder knock. Still no answer. Placing my ear against her door, I listened for the sound of the shower. Normally, she’d sing in the shower, so I was pretty sure she wasn’t there.

“Mom?”

No response.”

“Mom?” I repeated louder.

Given her lack of response, I ran around checking the house. Then I took to the front yard, searched around, and again to the backyard. No sign.

“Odd,” I wondered. “Her car is in the carport. Maybe she’s at the neighbor’s next door. I have to get going or will be late for class.”

My drive from Northwest Phoenix to Tempe was forty-five minutes on a good day, and with parking and running to class, I needed to allocate an hour minimum. Showing up late meant arriving to a locked classroom door, and I was nearing that hour mark. I figured I’d try her bedroom once more before leaving.

“Mom!” I yelled as loudly as possible.

A weak, muffled reply. “What?”

I was less relieved than angry that she didn’t reply to my first call.

“Oh, you’re awake. Eddie’s on the phone and says you were supposed to come in to work today. Are you getting ready?”

While I waited for a response, I tried her door knob.

It was locked.

“Mom?”

“What?”

“Did you hear me? Eddie’s on the phone . . .”

“I’m sick,” she interrupted. “Not going in. Bad headache.”

“Okay. Should I tell him that?”

No response.

I ran to the phone.

“Sir?”

“Yes,” he replied, obviously perturbed he waited so long.

“Sorry, she’s sick and it took a while to get her to respond.”

He was getting angry now. “So, she’s not coming in today?”

“No, a migraine or something. She can’t make it.”

“Well, have her call me when she feels better. I need a full staff here, and we’re already missing one of our tellers. I may need to go out on the line and help customers myself.”

“Okay, sir. I’ll let her know.”

He hung up without saying ‘goodbye.’ I looked at the clock.

“Damn, likely going to be late for my class.”

I scurried back to my mother’s bedroom door. “Mom, he says to just let him know when you feel better.”

Her response was muffled but I figured she understood, so I ran out the door to class.

At the time, neither of my sisters lived at home. My older sister had moved in with her hippie husband and resided elsewhere in Phoenix, while my younger sister was in a freshman dormitory on campus.

I arrived home in the evening from Tempe and was starving.

“Mom?” I said aloud, again at her door. “Is there anything for me to eat?”

No response.

This time, I was less patient. Checking the doorknob, it was clear she’d at least gotten up and maybe was feeling better.

I opened her door slowly. “Mom, do you mind if I come in?”

No response.

Peering around the corner, I could see she was in bed and beneath the covers, except for her head.

“Mom?” I whispered. “Are you asleep?”

After the evil Chuck episode of her life, I always had a worry, a nagging, constant worry, about her ability to work through her issues. She’d sometimes gaze off into the distance during a conversation or take too long to respond. She always complained of not getting enough sleep. And I had gone into her bedroom a few times before, finding her somewhat incoherent after taking various pills.

I chalked her odd behavior up to Chuck. She was never like that before encountering such evil. Perhaps getting beaten badly one too many times cause a switch to flip. Maybe it brutally impairs one’s sense of self. But I was nineteen, and what did I know about depression or other psychological maladies? They weren’t even close to being in my very limited wheelhouse.

At nineteen, I was the same insensitive guy who too loudly asked a friend in Psych 101 class, “Hey, when is that drunk getting here?” My friend frowned and shook his head disgustedly at me, pointing discreetly to the front of the class at the distinguished gentleman in a nice suit and tie, a volunteer who came to discuss his addiction and road to recovery. Joking about someone being a ‘drunk’ was a just one example of my insensitivity and high degree of self-absorption at the time.

Mom didn’t respond, so I jostled her slightly to wake up.

“Sorry to wake you, but I was getting hungry. You still have the headache?”

“Uh huh,” she uttered.

Her doctor’s name and number just happened to be on the night stand. I didn’t like what I saw so dialed away. He answered.

“She called me earlier today. Still has the headache?” he inquired.

“Yeah, but she seems very sleepy so it’s hard for me to know how bad it is because she’s somewhat drowsy and not talking much.”

“That’s likely from the pills she’s taking for pain. I didn’t prescribe her anything new but she has a cabinet full of drugs she could use for a headache. We should wait to see how she’s doing in the morning. If it’s still as painful, then I’ll make time to see her in my office tomorrow.”

It was the mid-1970s, and the pharma industry was just hitting its stride. A review of my mother’s medicine cabinet would show a host of pills in a rainbow of colors, shapes, and sizes. ‘Take two for pain.’ ‘Do not take with alcohol.’ ‘Narcotic.’ ‘Do not drive or operate machinery.’ Every warning imaginable was on those pills, and multiple containers were always strewn about on her bathroom sink.

“Okay, then,” I replied, “I guess we’ll see how she’s doing in the morning. If it’s still as bad, I’ll take her to your office if she can’t drive.”

Tomorrow was a Tuesday. Afternoon classes only, and I could allocate time from my busy schedule to cart my poor, ailing mother to the doctor if needed.

It was a hot September morning in Phoenix. At 9 a.m., the air conditioning was muttering its resonant hiss through the white grating above my bed. My mind was in that pre-waking stage of fine rest and solitude.

“What the hell is that sound?” I wondered.

A loud snoring. Clearly a human sound, but only my mother and I were at home.

I threw on a pair of pants, somewhat perturbed that I was fully awakened by the annoyance, and strode slowly up to her closed bedroom door.

The sound grew louder. I’d never heard anyone snore that loudly, not even as a joke on a TV show.

I opened her door.

There was my mother, sitting up straight in bed, her legs covered by the sheets. Her eyes were closed, mouth open, and her head snapped backward at each snore. I assumed she was in some phase of dreaming.

“Mom?”

She didn’t respond.

I shook her shoulder. “Mom?”

Still no response.

I picked up her blue princess phone.

The 911 crew arrived within minutes. I met them at the door and showed them to the bedroom, believing she had taken some inappropriate combination of drugs.

The young EMT lifted her eyelid.

“Stroke,” he affirmed to his partner matter-of-factly, as if I was not present.

My mind was a torrent. “Stroke?” I thought. “What? Her mother had a stroke in her fifties and still lives, but my mom is only forty-eight. Too young. They’ve misdiagnosed.”

Her upper body was slowly sinking downward to a prone position.

“Greg,” the EMT commanded. “I need you to help her breathe. Crawl directly behind her and push the back so she’s sitting up.

I did so, my hands pushing against the back shoulders of the woman who gave me birth, nurtured me, and generously tolerated my antics for nineteen years. She had little tension in her body, and the weight of holding her up was bearing down on me, sitting atop her pillow, crouched behind her, my left leg sticking out beside hers.

“Okay,” he signaled. “We’re moving her from the bed and placing her on this stretcher now.”

Just as he completed this sentence, her hand tightly grasped my exposed left calf. She let go as they lifted her from the bed.

***

“I’m sorry, son,” the neurologist concluded over the phone. “She shows little brain activity. Massive stroke. No frontal lobe signs. I need for you and your sisters to make a decision about whether to let her be a donor for others or to just let her go and pull the plug.”

After checking with my sisters who were at the house with me by this time, I picked the phone back up.

“That’s a good choice,” he offered. “Some lucky people will receive her corneas, her kidneys, and maybe more. I’ll need you to go to the hospital to sign papers so we can get this done.”

Within the next hour, I was in the frigid ICU at the hospital, signing papers a nurse had placed before me. I peered to my left and noticed a middle-aged woman lying fallow on a bed, her upper body oddly unclothed. I looked away. Was that mother?

I’ll never know if that’s the last I saw of her, but it matters not. I much prefer to think of her as that woman who jumped into the small but fast moving channel of deep water into which I had slipped while walking ten paces behind her on the way to Rainbow Bridge. I still retain the ruined Brownie camera she wore that day she saved my life.

Why is it you always hold a little regret for that obvious last thing you should have said when you had the chance? That stupid, little ‘I love you, Mom. You’re the greatest.’ Maybe because you didn’t express it enough times along the way.