Letters From A Distant Shore
Nothing marks the last normal hours of your life as special, nothing that you look back on and say, “There, that was the turning point. If only I had paid attention, I would have known, I would have treasured those hours. If only …” You awaken one morning to the same mundane details as any other day: housework, grocery shopping, squabbling children, sticky hands and faces, small irritations, and small pleasures. Without warning life pivots sharply, and you have left your last, inestimably precious, normal moment far behind. Then you would give anything to have it back, but it is lost to you forever.
Labor Day weekend is an ambiguous holiday, a turning point between seasons, the exuberant high notes of summer mingling with the sadder, deeper tones of fall. Warm light slanted through the kitchen windows that Saturday morning, illuminating the blue fruit bowl on the counter, filled with peaches. Amber globes flushed with rose, they glowed against the cold cobalt ceramic. A breeze lifted and stirred the white curtains over the sink. The sunlight still spoke of summer: deep red roses, a pitcher of lemonade on a garden table, and bees going about their work. But the outside air smelled of vineyards ready for harvest, dying leaves, short days and cold nights ahead. Autumn was whispering at the window.
I had made brunch, as I usually did on weekends – scrambled eggs, waffles, sliced strawberries, and set the kitchen table with blue and white dishes and fresh flowers from the yard in a terracotta pitcher. This was my favorite meal of the week, and with an extra day before going back to work, my mood was even lighter than usual on a Saturday morning. The day was full of possibilities as Kristor, the children, and I sat around the table eating, laughing, and making plans.
I worked on the closing argument for a trial while our younger son, David, attended a birthday party. Finally, the party was over and I collected my dirty little boy for the ride home. Once there, Annelise volunteered to coach David through a shower in the second-floor master bathroom. “Now squirt some of the shampoo—that’s the green stuff—on your head, Davey. Rub it in well. Keep your eyes closed! Now stick your head under the water … don’t open your eyes! Mom, David got shampoo in his eyes … MOM!” I kept an eye on them while folding laundry in the bedroom. Jeremy’s friend had left, and he and Kris were downstairs, quiet.
I heard Kris’s slow, heavy tread up the stairs. He stopped in the bedroom doorway, frowning slightly, and said, “I need to talk to you,” motioning that I should step out into the hallway.
Now what? Exasperated, I expected to hear that we needed to make one more run to Office Max for school supplies or that Kris was once again having problems with our home computer. Just what I need, another complication to get in the way of working on my trial argument.
“There’s something wrong with Jeremy; I think he may be having a stroke,” Kris said quietly, in such an ordinary voice that I stared at him blankly for several seconds, unable to make sense of his words. “I think Jeremy is having a stroke,” Kris repeated deliberately, my rational husband who always thought through all the implications before speaking.
The world roared, and shrank down to a black point like sand sucked through an hourglass.
Jeremy had called out to Kris from the kitchen a few moments earlier. He was losing control of his right side. Kris found him slumped heavily against the door jamb and helped him slide slowly, slowly, down onto the floor.
My heart lurched and accelerated. “Lisie, get David out of the shower and dried off, and STAY HERE,” I rapped out and flew down the stairs, swiveled at the landing, leaped down more stairs, and skidded around the corner into the kitchen. “KRIS, CALL 911!” echoed off the stairwell in my wake. Jeremy was lying on his back on the bleached oak floor between the stove and the refrigerator. I fell to my knees next to him. His eyes, usually so luminous, were dark with terror. “Mom, what’s wrong, I can’t move my right side; what’s wrong with me?” he asked, with a child’s faith that I could take away his fear. “Help me,” he pleaded, “please help me, please … please …” His words trailed off. And I, despite my fierce and watchful mother love, my worldly competence, I could do nothing to save him.
I hunched over Jeremy, stroking his hair with my left hand, gripping his hand tightly with my right, holding him with my eyes, and talking aloud nonstop: “Our Father, who art in heaven, I love you Jeremy, I love you, breathe, Jeremy, breathe, hallowed be thy name, keep breathing, thy kingdom come, I love you, I’m here, thy will be done, oh God, Jeremy keep breathing, breathe in, breathe out, on earth as it is in heaven, I’m here Jeremy, stay with me, breathe … breathe …”
Jeremy had lost all movement in the right half of his body. One eye was still blue, the other all pupil, a black window on the catastrophe happening in his brain. As he pleaded with me to help him, his speech slurred and slowed into unintelligibility. He’s slipping away; he might be dying. I was not ready. This cannot be happening. There was no time to help him prepare to meet death. My boy. He slid toward unconsciousness too quickly, with fear as his last companion, leaving me behind.
Within minutes a fire truck pulled up, blocking the narrow street outside the kitchen windows, and the room filled with large men in hard boots and turnout gear, and with questions: A fall? Blow to the head? Drugs? I answered mechanically, faintly surprised at my ability to talk normally. My mind seemed to have fractured along horizontal fault lines. The high-level processor was still in charge, calm, rational, refusing to yield to hysteria. The child-mind beneath was curled under the bedclothes, hands over ears and eyes shut tight. At the deepest level, nightmare creatures slithered through subterranean waters, leaving dimly felt ripples in their wake.
With an oxygen mask strapped to his face, Jeremy no longer spoke but still struggled valiantly to lift his head from the floor, to rise above the darkness that engulfed him. An ambulance arrived and spilled more men into the crowded kitchen. The paramedics worked fast. They lifted him onto a gurney and carried him to the street. Somewhere between the door of the house and the sidewalk, his brain shutting down one sector at a time, Jeremy stopped breathing.
Marie Lawson Fiala has a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of San Francisco. She is a full-time practicing attorney and a partner in an international law firm, specializing in complex commercial litigation. Her book, Letters from a Distant Shore was published in May 2010; she has published several essays in literary journals. She is married and the mother of three children, and lives with her family, two wise cats and a humble dog, in Berkeley, California. Visit her at www.Marie Lawson Fiala.com.
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