Final Jeopardy

My mom died in the morning. My step-father knocked at my door. I wasn't asleep, but rather waiting. He said, "Your mom's not breathing" and stepping into the cool hall, the first thing I noticed was the silence.

For days, her breathing had filled the house with deep, raspy gurgling. It was inescapable and unmistakable. Impossible to ignore or normalize, It shouted over the whir and spinning of the dryer. During meals with my step-father and brothers, it blatantly interrupted Jeopardy and our attempts to forget, to believe we were having a nice dinner together....that our mom was dying down the hall in a hospital bed that she detested and hadn't eaten anything in three days. The death rattle is a death knell, it speaks loudly and makes sure that those around are called into the present. Maybe it serves as preparation for what is soon to come, perhaps it is us it means to rattle..... If I had gotten out for a walk, it was there as I cracked the back door, growing louder as I made my way through the kitchen and down the hall to peer in and check on her. I found myself pacing around in the two-part awareness that it wasn't going to stop , but that, "Oh yeah, it was going to stop." You could hear it at night down the hall, you could hear it from behind a closed door with your head under a pillow.

Days before her death, she had started bringing her hands up to rest at either side of her neck...a Pharaoh...a bird. Her fingers, long and chalky, felt like a cool wax. Her once electric blue eyes had grayed, they were locked in a distant stare under eyelids that had slipped half way down. Thinking she would be more comfortable, I would take her arms down one at a time to stretch out along her side. She offered no resistance, but over the course of hours, would slowly bring them up again, elbows darting pointedly to either side, fingertips grazing her sunken cheeks and her lips moving around a string of silent words.

Her gurgling rattle seemed untrue. I would stand over her and listen, I would swallow hard imagining her parched throat, I would clear mine for her. I would cry and dribble water down her throat with an eye-dropper hoping her eyes would widen blue, hoping her lips would soften red, hoping her hand would warm pink and slide behind my ear, hoping she'd say something in the voice I had already forgotten. Instead she would burst into a violent series of coughs that I was sure were going to end with her dying ---me standing over her with empty eye-dropper cum smoking gun.