My Mother's Body

I never saw his mother's body after her death. A man on the other line asked me if I wanted to — if they had to delay the cremation so that I could drive two and a half hours up the coast to where he was lying in the morgue. It is pale and has bright red cherry angiomas, on its sides with purple stripes of many kidney transplants and its arms have old red tubes where the tremors made him itch, and I could see it was enough with my mother's body alive.

It is different now as it is my body. I find myself fascinated and curious as I am corrected and marked. Stripes, as they were, but have markings and dotted lines. It makes me think of a bush painting that describes various cuts of flesh, and that makes me laugh because it is so close to reality.

Mother's feet were blue and cold as if she were already dead, and her thick yellow toes always had a "v" cut on them, so that they would not sink. They were drenched anyway, most of the time, the toes were swollen red and white due to the disease. My grandparents asked me to rub their feet occasionally so that I could try to restore blood circulation to them. I hated touching those dying things. It seemed to me that if they died they would not be harmed, and I was afraid that rubbing them alive would hurt her.

My feet are cold and the nurse brings me another warm blanket, which slides neatly into my feet with almost maternal care as she thanks me for what I will do.

"She is brave," he said. I sigh with words of thanks because I know you mean that, but he won’t be so wrong.

My mother's eyesight was failing, the sclera was faint yellow, and her right eye was turning up and down permanently in a way that was always looking at me half and half in her skull. His eyes were rarely closed, even in sleep, and even knowing he was blind, superstitiously I sat outside the line of that one eye when his breathing slowed down so that my movements would not interfere with his dreams.

My eyes are as blue as his, and my vision is perfect. It makes me happy to know that corneas are always needed.

Finally, my mother's body had a flexible rubber tube protruding from her abdomen. The nurses were asking what flavor she wanted: chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. They were laughing as they said, not bad, but trying to make a joke, trying to express a smile. "Pink," she was heard to say, crying softly at the sound of "k" (before the disease had taken away her speech). He was no longer joking at the time. There was nothing funny about the flavors he could not taste, but he knew the happy pink from the brown and white crumbs.

All the pleasures of life: seeing something beautiful or lovable, the taste of something sweet or yellow, the satisfaction of standing or stretching or rolling on your bed unheard of, all were taken from him, until my mother was right. body, covered with bedsores and thin bones.

I fasted as I needed, taking nothing but water twenty-four hours ago. My stomach aches so much, and I wish I could tell her not to worry, her suffering is about to end. My stomach, an insignificant thing, will be one of my few discarded parts. There are no abortion markets.

I have often thought about my mother's mind. Gray-covered with sores and plaques, he wanted to donate it to science. He may imagine researchers in white, looking through a microscope at his delicate brain, opening up their secrets and finding a solution. But it is complicated, to donate human remains. There are papers to be signed, and his hand had stopped working for the "x" years moving before. He wanted the best out of his suffering. No one did.

My hand shook when I signed the first letter. By the tenth my signature was smooth and familiar; by the twentieth century, the crab shook again. No less than three lawyers, two lawyers, psychiatrists, and a team of twelve members of the medical community needed to find me at this time.

They shave my head and I start to get scared. Technology is new, and it is always dangerous. They have performed the procedure with me three times, and they made me watch the video. They assured me that the discomfort was minimal, that the "knowledge" would be as "organized" as it is now. What they say is that I will still be myself. If nothing goes wrong.

"What you are doing is good," they said. "He will help a lot of people." They ask me if I have any questions.

"Just one," I said as the needle went into my spine, shaking me like an electric shock. "How long?"

I still wonder about my mother's mind. Trapped in a body full of pain that he could not control, his brain was in danger, what was left of him? Did you listen, understand, dream? Did he hear me read it, and did he know that the stories were not true? Was he still mentally healthy? It has long been my opinion that it would have been better if he had not been there.

He cried every time he heard the music. We left the radio at the soft rock station he had enjoyed, but sometimes - after his tongue had betrayed him and he could no longer tell us why - he would cry whenever we turned it on, tears streaming down his cheeks. his eyes remained open. Were they songs? A hymn? Was it really painful to hear those songs about love and loss, a reminder of what he never had and never will have? Or did it move him because he was the only thing he could enjoy?

Eventually, we stopped turning on the radio, if possible.

Back in surgery they carefully reaped what I left behind, the amount I paid to be part of this study. The body would eventually collapse, become ill, sweat, and smell. It is no longer part of me; it will be part of the others now, others want and need.

As a child, I believed in the afterlife. First the Heaven I was taught in Sunday School, then my own version, where my consciousness was separated from my body and I was free to roam the universe, to see all that was unseen, to know all that was. to know. This is not at all the same, but it is close.

I wonder if his heart was still good enough, and his courage. I wonder if it was enough for him to buy her freedom.

No, I said. I don't want to see her body.