Kristine Rusch - Reflections on Life and Death

“Then I’ll go out happy,” Gram said. She shucked off her shoes and her sweatpants. Sarah took those too.

“Life’s one big adventure, Sarah. You gotta live it the best way you can,” Gram said, and ran for the frigid water.

Sarah stood at the door of her mother’s hospital room and watched her mother sleep.

Old age.

It was going to kill her, and no matter what the doctor said, it would probably kill all of them eventually.

It didn’t matter how you died, Gram used to say. What mattered was how you lived.

And how had she lived these last few years? Like her mother. Selfish and focused and angry at the hand life had dealt her. Ever since Greg left— Greg. She hadn’t let herself think his name since he walked out, leaving her with three children and an apartment she couldn’t afford on her own. No one had one-caretaker apartments any more, and she had been struggling against that for years, angry at Greg, angry at the world.

Not proud of herself like Gram would have been.

Proud for beating the system.

Sarah swallowed. “Mom?” She came closer to the bed. “Mom, wake up.”

Her mother smiled. The dots on her cheeks moved as she did. “I was awake. I was watching you.”

Sarah started. She hadn’t expected the same scrutiny she was giving her mother.

“Children grow away from you, you know,” her mother said.

“I know,” Sarah said. She’d been watching hers do that every day.

“From the minute they leave the womb, they’re not yours any more. They’re strangers.”

Sarah approached her mother. “Are we strangers, Mom?”

Tears floated in her mother’s eyes.

She touched her mother’s arm. She had lived inside this body once. It had been her first home. How could she let someone else discard it, as if it had never been? “I’m going to bring you to my place,” Sarah said.

Her mother blinked, but her cheeks remained dry. “I’m not going to be noble like your grandmother was.”

Sarah smiled. It was against her mother’s nature to be noble. She squeezed her mother’s arm. Gram’s suicide had been awful.

“Nobility’s overrated,” Sarah said.

1986: Gram’s backyard. Sarah put her pudgy arms around her Gram’s neck and wiped her tears with one grimy mitten. “How come you’re crying for the people in that shuttle if you didn’t know them?” she asked.

Gram shook her head, then buried her face in Sarah’s hair. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes lives and dreams are so mixed up together, and you don’t realize it until it’s too late.”

Gram was holding her too tight Sarah squirmed. Gram let go. Sarah sat on Gram’s knee.

Gram smiled at her. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Sarah shook her head. Sometimes big people said kinds of stuff she didn’t understand.

“It’s okay,” Gram said. “You’ll figure it out soon enough.”

The hide-a-bed cost half a month’s salary, but Sarah figured she could afford it, with her mother’s allowance going toward rent. The living room was crammed with knick-knacks Sarah had once hoped she would never have to live with again. Her mother’s heavy, ancient television set with its curved screen sat in the hallway, waiting to be carried to the back bedroom. The bedroom had been Sarah’s. From that night on, it would be her mother’s.

And, surprisingly, Sarah didn’t mind. This was the chance she had missed with Gram. This was the chance she needed with her own mother. Too many people watched life’s beginning and shied away from its end.

“I still don’t get it,” Janie said as she carried in the last box from storage. “Why doesn’t she get her own apartment?”

“They don’t make new leases with people over seventy, stupid,” Scooter said. He was rummaging through the previous box, seeing if there were any old chips. Sarah reached into an open one beside her and brought out an old attachable house sound system. She handed it to Scooter. He squealed with delight and looked for the chip.

“I don’t see why she has to come here,” Janie said again.

“Because I asked her,” Sarah said.

“You don’t even like her, Mom,” Trina said. She was bouncing on the hide-a-bed, testing its springs.

Sarah took Trina’s arm, and gently stopped her bouncing. Trina let her, almost as if she had been expecting it. After three children, Sarah knew how to parent.

But her mother had only had one. Sarah had been an accident, unplanned. Sarah’s children were planned, but being raised the same way. By one woman alone.

“I don’t know her any more,” Sarah said. “I don’t know if I like her or not.”

“Then why bring her here?” Janie asked, sitting beside Trina.

Sarah looked at her daughters, and wondered how they would feel after their grandmother was gone.

When their own mother was dying.

The law said they weren’t responsible, any more than she was.

“I’m bringing her here,” Sarah said, “because life’s an adventure.”

She had forgotten that. All these years, she’d forgotten it. It had taken her mother, of all people, to remind her.

“An adventure?” Janie asked, as if she had never heard that before.

“An adventure,” Sarah said. “I’d just forgotten, until now.”