1985

From my vantage point in the spectator row at the courthouse in Corpus Christi, Texas, in August of 1985, I had an excellent view of the judge,the jury and the star witness, Bill.  The company for which Bill worked in north Texas had been sued by a client, and my husband was integral to the defense because he kept copious notes of all his telephone conversations.  There was little Perry Mason excitement since the issue did not involve murder but the construction of a building.  Perhaps that is why the judge kept nodding off and at least one of the jurors could be counted upon to be sleeping at any given time.  It seemed that the only wake-up call sounded when the prosecution attorney, a former Baptist minister with a formidable voice and compelling girth, took center stage to deliver his case and rebuttal.  Though I am certain the jury, or judge, for that matter, understood very little of the proceedings and the minutia involved in them, the lungs of the former minister filled with enough hot air to regale the twelve men and women long and loud with stories of fraud and corruption.  The trial was a contest of flair over fact, and it tested Bill's patience for the several weeks that litigation lasted.  His presence was needed in order to make the difference between a win or loss for his company.  It was intense and all-consuming.

The only problem was, my mother was dying four hundred miles away.  My sisters and I were taking turns being with Mother since her declaration three weeks earlier that she would stop eating and die.  Daddy was around but of small comfort to Mother.  There was not much to do for her except change her colostomy bag or wipe her face with a cool rag.  She was not taking morphine nor drinking liquids, although once, a few days before her death, she asked for grape juice. More and more every day she drifted away from us.  Since Bill was in Corpus Christi, I brought my children with me when I took care of Mother, so I was somewhat divided in my attention.  At night, though, I slept beside her.  She was often restless, murmuring and twitching in her half-sleep. "I love you, Mother," I would whisper and stroke her forehead or her arm.  "Do you need anything?"  Usually there was no response, for Mother was on her difficult journey home, alone, and I, only a faint echo that drew her too much back to earth.

Bill was staying in a hotel in Corpus Christi, so our children and I joined him there for a few days by the ocean. For me, it was not the respite it could have been because my thoughts were constantly with Mother's struggle.  However, the children loved the warm surf and hot sun of the south Texas beach, especially after having to spend several quiet, boring days with me and their grandparents.  Bill needed me, too.  The trial was a grinding process and he had been alone for a couple of weeks.  As I sat in my beach chair watching my children play in the waves, I felt engulfed in inadequacy.  My mission in Fort Worth and in Corpus Christi was to make things better.  To "be there."  Yet, being there was ineffective, at best.  The trial was not going well, Mother would soon be gone, and Daddy, my Daddy, had disappeared and left this other man in his place. I wanted to be powerful enough to effect a change - to make things right again.  It defied reason that I could raise the dying, resurrect the phoenix from the ashes, and save my husband's company from ruin, but I took responsibility for those impossibilities on some covert level.  Imagine the grating guilt that ensued when everything finally fell apart.

I would have gone back home if Daddy had told me he had called a hospice nurse in to care for Mother.  Apparently he wanted time off from taking care of her, so he was asleep on the other side of the house when Mother died on August 21, 1985.  The nurse went to wake him.  Mother's breathing had been deep and rasping; she had not been conscious for two days.  Daddy called me at the hotel.  "She's gone."  That was all.

"Were you with her?"  Someone should have been holding her hand.  She did not want to be alone.

"No. No, I was asleep.  The hospice nurse told me."

"I would have come home, Daddy.  Why didn't you tell me?"

"You are not a nurse, Kay."  He was quiet for a minute.  "She needed a nurse."

"I'll be there tomorrow then."  The children and Bill were in the room and I did not have to tell them what had happened.  We all sat down on our hotel bed and held hands.  I did not cry.  Maybe that is why Bill did not know what was taking place inside of me; he could not read my mind or my emotions.  Thoughts of Mother moving in wonder through streets of transparent gold, transformed, whole, joyous and glowing in the presence of her Savior transported me, temporarily suspended in time and space.  She had made it home!  Free now from earthly wrangling, from disappointment and disease; released to the awesome, unspeakable majesty of God.  The realization left me breathless.  "I wonder what she is doing now?"  The thought became my mainstay for the next several trying days of hours.

The twenty-first of August was a Wednesday.  The children and I flew back to Wichita Falls so I could pack us up for the funeral and the next few days.  I drove to Fort Worth late on Thursday.  Bill had to stay in Corpus Christi for court on Thursday and Friday.  He was important to the trial - had to be there; so, he was not available to me.  In the moment, I just wanted to get home.  I had promises to Mother I needed to keep - had to be there.  That meant shuffling three children who could not stay with their grandfather while making several trips to the funeral home and helping arrange for the service.  I could not have articulated it at the time, but I was so completely uncomfortable with this "new" father, agitated and off-center in his presence, that I needed Bill there as a buffer.  My last eight months and had been spent trying to hold everyone else up; now I was vulnerable and unsteady, moving without props through a maze of grief.

That a hospice worker - not my father or I - had been there when the death rattle in Mother's chest quieted and she left this world caused me to believe I had failed her - failed myself.  She deserved to be kissed good-bye.  Mother's last breath also marked the beginning of life with our father as we now knew him.  There would no longer be our mother's illness and her need of us to soften his offense.  As my younger sister so poignantly expressed it, we were all three rather angry with God for taking Mother and leaving us with Daddy.  The irony was not lost on us.

Late Saturday afternoon, Bill piled in the car with me and our children after we retrieved him at the DFW airport.  The car was filled with the noise of reunion, everyone talking at once.  It was not until later, when the children were occupied with toys or television, that Bill and I had time to talk.  Beyond tired, I was looking forward to emotionally and physically leaning on my husband.  I wanted to take a deep breath, believing someone had arrived to take the helm and relieve me of my watch.

"I'm so glad you're here," I sighed as I grabbed some dirty plates and began to load Daddy's dishwasher.

"You're lucky I got to come."

What?  This was said so fervently that it stopped me cold.  I'm lucky he is here?  Indignity froze me.  Lucky.  It stabbed me and something died that took years to resuscitate.  "Then just go back."

I closed the dishwasher door and walked from the room, leaving Bill there with his mouth agape.

Had my heart not received so many other crushing blows, this one could have been worked through logically.  He was important in Corpus; they needed him.  But not as much as I did.  He meant it was a good thing the court allowed him to make this important trip, but that is not what he said.  I was not crying hysterically, seemed stoic, and we all knew Mother was going to die.  My husband had no real understanding of the olio of emotions wrestling in me.  First abandoned by my father, then Mother, and now, Bill.  Loss.  Whispering to me that I was alone.  Grief on grief, sealing the thought, caused me to take my  heart back, harden it against another onslaught. A deadly, selfish choice made in the fog of introspection.  I remember thinking: "I don't want to live anymore."