It Was Our Summer of Dying
They say death is final — but I know dying is never finished
When my stepfather died, my mother was in the kitchen, cleaning up after supper. I was in the back room where we had set up the hospital bed for him.
I had just put some balm on his lips. He’d made no effort to take the ice cream I’d held to his mouth on a spoon. Nor any water.
The house was quiet, the way houses can be in Georgia mill towns on late summer evenings. Some vague news was buzzing at the far end of the hall, peeper frogs chirped away in the darkening trees outside the window, and he was breathing.
That house stood at the top of a hill where, at the start of that long summer of ’95, he had been cutting the grass when he fell and tumbled down the slope. At first, my mother feared another heart attack.
I didn’t hear of this until after she phoned me in North Carolina, barely able to say it was brain cancer. Late stage. Of course, I didn’t have to come down, but I should know.
By the time I reached the Emory trauma center in Atlanta, it was well after dark. The waiting area was illuminated dimly, indirectly, and the windows superimposed a sketchy reflection of the room and its occupants over constellations of the city lights beyond.
