Time To Go

Five years old.

What are all the sirens for? What's going on? I wondered. I jump up, accidentally kick over my plastic army men, and run over to my window to see an ambulance in the driveway, with lights flashing and siren blaring, and paramedics running into my house with a gurney.

Huh?

I then run down the hall towards the stairs and hear a lot of people talking and my sisters crying. I creep down the stairs and peek around the corner. I see my mom on the floor. There is blood everywhere. On her, the carpet, the walls and into the bathroom.

What? What's wrong? What happened?

Five years old.

My sisters see me and take me back upstairs and tell me mom is really sick and needs to go to the hospital. We all cry.

On the way to the hospital, Mom flatlines. Twice. But she fights and comes back both times.

She spends quite a few days in the hospital having her stomach repaired and recovering from massive blood loss. An ulcer ate away her stomach and the surgeons could only save about half of it. But she made.

Since I was five, I didn't get the chance to visit her in the hospital, but my dad gave us all update everyday when he came home from visiting with her. We had a lot of people bring us food and they watched us three kids while Dad was with Mom.

A week or so later, she comes home. Emaciated and weak, but doing better. Still not out of the woods though.

It's a Friday night.

We all go to bed to get some much needed rest.

Frantically, she wakes up not feeling well. Something is wrong. She is not sick and her stomach is fine, but she is running a fever. A bad fever. She tries to fight through it. While lying in bed trying to get back to sleep, she looks down the hallway towards my room. My door is open and the light from the streetlight shines through my window. She closes her eyes for a second, but her mind is telling her "open your eyes". She does. What she sees, startles her. She sees a figure manifesting in my room, and the light from the streelight is shining through it. If begins walking towards her and is getting more and more solid the closer it gets.

The figure walks into my parent's room, but she is not afraid. There is a calm coming over her. He is a teen boy in jeans and a letterman jacket. He walks up to her, reaches out his hand and says "Hello, Jean. It is time to go" Mom replies "Go where?" He calmly states "It is time to leave this earth" She firmly says "No, I have my kids to raise and I'm not leaving. I'm not"

My Dad is fast asleep next to her.

The figure doesn't say another word. He turns and walks back down the hall towards my room and gets more translucent the farther away he gets, until he disappears.

Suddenly, the phone rings and wakes everyone up. My Dad answers "Hello?" On the other line is a good friend crying and sobbing. My Dad is trying to understand what she is saying, but can't make it out. After a few minutes of trying to talk with her, she is able to talk. "Michael, my son, i..is..is..is dead! He...he...he was killed in a car accident after the high school football game tonight" My Mom, hearing this, grabbed the phone from my Dad and asked if he was "wearing a letterman's jacket?"

He was.

Realizing this, my Mom told the friend that she was just visited by a teenage boy in a letterman's jacket and the boy said that it was "Time to go" and held out his hand. Now she realized why she wasn't scared-she knew who he was and had met him before. He was on his way to beyond this world.

She talks to this day of that night and how much she knew she had to stay on this earth and raise her kids.

She's tough my Mom. I'm damn lucky she stayed.