The Bloom

Death and grief

My mother lay on the bed, her eyes closed, her face paling. She was silent, peaceful in her long flannel nightgown with the red cardinals dancing across its soft white fabric. It was her favorite. She looked warm, which gave me comfort as she was always cold. I recalled to myself how even in the dead of summer, she would have the heat cranked up. I pictured her sitting in her brown electric recliner, feet up, Diet Pepsi on one side, TV. remote on the other, covered in multiple fuzzy blankets. The thought faded as I realized the reality of what was happening took hold again.

“Dead of summer.” The word “dead” lingered in my mind, even as I watched her struggling. She was dying, but I wasn’t ready. We weren’t ready. We had plans—she was supposed to get better. The rehabilitation center was just a temporary stop. She was to move in with me, spend days laughing, painting, and enjoying her grandchildren. Holding her hand, now clammy and mottled, I walked to the end of the bed and pulled up her light blue quilt. Maybe she was cold, after all. I didn’t want her cold, just as I never wanted to face this moment.

Tears slid down my cheeks, slowly at first, then faster as silent sobs overtook me. I tried to compose myself. I had been sitting here for two days—washing her face, holding her hand. There were moments when I danced with her, gently moving her limp hand in mine as I twirled around the room. She always loved to dance. I loved dancing with her. She once told me I could teach her when we met again—on the other side. That thought lingered as I held on to these last hours.

The other side. The time had passed so quickly since the vision. The vision had come to me in a meditation. I say vision, but it’s more like if feeling could speak. I sat quietly, slowly breathing in and out, when the “feeling” of words came to mind as if the feelings themself had a voice. “ Your mother will pass in 6 months, in a year. You will have time if you take it. The choice is your dear one.” As I ended my meditation with the feeling that something would happen in 6 months and that my mother would pass in about a year, I felt confused. Mom was only 77 or maybe 78 if she was slightly over the year. Either way, she wasn’t failing in health to the extent of a life-ending scenario, and she had just been to the doctor. She was fine. I must be going crazy. I shook off the feeling and went on with my day.

Sitting beside her now, those memories felt close and unreachable. I longed for two days earlier, when she was lively—laughing, loving, reminiscing about her childhood. She shared stories about her dog Sandy chasing sticks through fields, memories that always made us both smile. She spoke of missing her grandfather, him visiting her in dreams and bringing her comfort. That thought gave her peace. He seemed to be visiting her nightly this past week. “Don’t be sad, honey,” she reassured me. “I have a lot of grandparents I haven’t met yet.” In her words, I tried to find comfort.

My mind slipped back into reality again, to my mother, lying there. Still. So very still. I reached up and brushed a strand of brown hair from her slightly purpling, plump cheek. Her hair was slightly peppered with grays, but for 77, almost 78, she still had a full head of brown hair. Her cheeks seemed to be thinning more and more as the hours passed. Maybe that was my imagination. Reality was bending as the hours faded away. Her breathing was calm thanks to the oxygen tubing that swept over her ears and rested beneath her nose.

“ The oxygen,” I whispered with a light chuckle, remembering the mishap the day before. The whole family had been here: my stepfather, both brothers, my sister-in-law, and my mother's grandchildren. We had been taking turns sitting by her side, talking, crying, telling stories, making peace with a reality no one wanted to accept. Mom's eyes were closed, and she was resting. She had been for hours. Slowly, her breathing began to labor and grow shallower, more ragged. The signs that let one know that the end is nearing. We all sobbed; some left for home. We were convinced her time was near. Those left comforted mom, reassuring her of our love and that it would be okay if she let go of this life for the next.

Moments later, her nurse entered her room. He was a tall, muscular, handsome man from Guana. His features were gentle and his voice kind. His skin was a deep brown, and he liked to joke that residents had trouble seeing him on his nightly rounds. He has been caring for my mom for months now. Weeks earlier in another hall, and then now, here in the room she would never leave. He shared how he often stopped in to see her smile and listen to her laugh, even when she was not on his patient list. She reminded him of his mother, who had passed two years prior.

He now looked at my mother with deep concern and glared at us with angst that was unfamiliar coming from him.“She shouldn’t be struggling to breathe.” His voice was abrupt. Looking down beside her bed, he notices the issue. When he told us what had happened, we all burst into laughter. Not because what had happened was humorous, but more absurdly ironic. His face now twisting with anger and confusion, I began to explain the inappropriate laughter.

My stepfather, blind since his teens, was always knocking over and unplugging my mother’s things. It was a frustratingly humorous area for her. “Dang it, he spilled my pop.” Or “Dad accidentally unplugged my chair again. I can’t get out!” She would call out! Then she would began whispering under her breath how she wished he wouldn’t be so stubborn and he would use his cane in the house. She was never really angry.

Apparently, Dad had done it again. He sat down, pushed his chair back, and entangled the oxygen tubing that had overflowed off the side of the bed and onto the floor. As he slid his chair, he unknowingly yanked the tubing from the tank. In our grief, we mistook the moment for a sign of the end; really, it was just another comical, albeit dark, misadventure of my stepfather. Strange the things we laugh at when faced with grief.

Now the family had all gone home, and I was alone. Refusing to leave the woman who knew me best and loved me anyway. Just me and mom. My best friend, my protector, my source of artistic exploration, and my many hours of undeniable laughter. There she was lying there waiting silently for her body to say, “Enough’s enough,” even though her mind had wanted so badly to stay.

The past six months had become a sequence of fatal diagnoses. Each time, doctors would say, “We’ll have to wait and see.” Still, she kept fighting, giving us more days to laugh, cry, and speak every thought. Remembering my earlier vision, I realized it had come true—a new crisis at six months: sepsis and double pneumonia, then a rare vascular disease whose treatment left her vulnerable, and finally leukemia. Our time together had always felt borrowed yet blessed.

I sat alone, crying, hugging Mom’s now-fragile frame, once so full of fire and joy. Eventually, the door opened, and the family began to pour back into the room: my daughter, my youngest brother, and my mother's husband. We jokingly told him to stay away from the oxygen tank. He laughed and took a seat next to my daughter at the foot of Mom's bed.

My brother sat on one side, I on the other, each holding a hand. Both are accepting the inevitable in silence. Patiently, the air in the room began to shift. It was so subtle, a gradual shift. In fact, I wasn’t sure it was shifting at all. Maybe my grief was causing me to disassociate a bit.

Suddenly, my mother sat up,her eyes opened, she pointed toward the ceiling, and a gasp of knowing escaped from her previously soundless lips. “ Oh. Oh!” Then, as quickly as she had risen, her body lay back down to rest.

Silently, a mist filled with lights, as if lightning bugs in the dark if night, floated downward from the ceiling. The stream was endless, encompassing my mother's whole being. It was as if these iridescent blue beings were gathering her essence.

“Did anyone else seeing that?” I asked with disbelief.

My brother nodded silently, my daughter sensed movement though not the light, and my stepfather asked for clarification, still seeking to understand the unfolding moment. Moments later, the stream collected into what looked like a thin translucent veil. As quickly as it formed, it disappeared, leaving my thoughts spinning between certainty and doubt. Had I imagined it? But my brother and daughter saw something too. It wasn’t just in my mind.

As I came to the realization that I had seen it, I felt a rustle in my hair. A whoosh of wind spun around my head and then through me, though not a hair on my head moved. I turned, and next to me, a yellowish bar of light brightly appeared, then snapped shut. In that moment, I could feel it—she was gone. One month short of a year. Her body lay there, her breathing now shallowing, her oxygen still intact.

“Could it be the wind? Am I crazy?” The windows were shut. There were no air vents in my near vicinity that I could see. My brother said,” She poked me in the arm.” I felt it. I explained what I felt: the tossing of my hair, the wind, her essence flowing through me, if only for a brief moment. I felt how free she was. How filled with bliss. The four of us sat silently, in disbelief, in awe.

. You hear about miracles like these, but you never fully understand until you live them. The air in the room began to slowly take on a new feeling. It was denser than it had been. Mom began to thin out now. It wasn’t just my imagination. The plumpness that had caused her to bloat and swell over the past few months was beginning to fade. The tumors that had grown on her neck and arm were obvious now. Outside her window, a rhododendron bush. Its deep green leaves took a back seat to one singular purple bloom. Mom’s favorite color.