A Christmas Week Memory

Around the sleepy time between Christmas and New Year’s, when I was 12, I sat with my mother putting away decorations. My right arm was in a cast, as I had fallen earlier in December at my grandparents’ house and broken my wrist. So, I helped as best I could, still in my nightgown and robe because dressing was difficult.

My mother was upset. My mother generally was upset, and she was complaining about how she felt used and unloved. I remember sitting there telling her I loved her, when someone banged on the back door.

Mom jerked open the door to find Betty, the neighbor from the foot of the hill, breathless, towing her two children. "Loren . . . tractor . . ." she gasped. My mother’s face lit up in alarm.

“What’s happened?” she cried, leading poor Betty into the kitchen while I fetched her a glass of water.

Betty explained that there’s been an accident with the tractor; my brother was hurt. Betty’s husband, Barry, had taken my father and brother to the emergency room in their car. Their only car. Betty had run up the hill to get my mother.

It was a long run.

My mother shouted for me to get clothes, and I climbed into the back of the station wagon. I tried to dress as my mother sped around old dirt roads and curvy paved ones, her voice low while she prayed aloud, the only time I’d ever heard her do so, “Jesus, don’t let him die. We’ll go back to church if you keep him alive.”

I fell against the car door as she drove, landing on my broken wrist. But I didn’t say anything, I simply kept dressing until I finally had clothes on.

I don’t remember going into the emergency room; I’m not even sure which hospital we went to. I remember being told to sit in a chair near a room, so I sat. My father came out of the room and he hugged my mother. He was crying. I don’t remember what he said.

Eventually, a man in a white coat stopped by my chair. He looked at me, dressed hurriedly and probably crookedly, my arm in a cast, surely worried about the little boy I’d spent my entire life loving and protecting. He asked me to come with him. I did. He took me into a nearby room. “How did you break your arm?” he asked.

I told him how I’d fallen at my grandparents, playing in the basement. 

“Your father didn’t do this?” he said. I shook my head no. I would be an adult before I realized that the doctor suspected my father, at least, of something bad.

Later, I sat in the front seat of the station wagon, my father at the wheel. I remember exactly where we were, driving down the ramp off of Elm Avenue and pulling onto Interstate 581, when my father cleared his throat. “I’m sorry you had to see your ol’ dad cry,” he said.

“That’s ok, Daddy. Jesus cried, too,” I responded.

If only that was the end of the story. My brother would live, I learned. He was injured and would be in the hospital for a few days, but he eventually would be ok. I wasn’t sure what had happened, exactly. I couldn’t go to see him because back then, in 1975, they didn’t allow children under 16 in to the hospital to visit. My father took me to stay with my grandparents while he and my mother tended to my brother.

And in the middle of the night on New Year’s Day, the ambulance came to my grandparent’s house. I remember groggily hearing the noise, being told by someone to go back to bed, but I wasn’t able to. I also knew I needed to call my mother to tell her that her father was sick.

I tried the hospital but even though I explained to the operator that this was an emergency, she would not put my call through to my mother until 7 a.m. She answered the phone, and I blurted out it out. 

“Grandpa’s gone to the hospital in an ambulance, he is very sick.”

The next thing I remember is my mother coming in the door of my grandparents’ house, her eyes teary. “Boys, Daddy’s gone,” she said.

My grandfather had died of a heart attack.

I am old now, older than my mother ever got to be. When all of this happened, she would have been only 31 years old. What a heavy lot to lay on an unhappy young woman, a woman trapped by circumstance with two young children, living on a farm where she didn’t want to be. She must have been in horrible pain inside.

I was 37 when my mother died, older than she was when her father died - though my mother died at the same age as her father. 

My grandmother outlived my mother. 

I am still here.

Life can be funny that way.