About Deb

She was fifty, on or about her death. She had been a teacher, but mostly a mother and housewife.

By the end of my life, if all goes well, she will have only seen a fraction of who I am .

Deb was dead when he found her on the bathroom floor, we just didn’t want to know it yet.

We waited in the room designed for patience, not much more than a hallway, a bright white space at Yale New Haven Hospital. For five days, we prayed silently and separately, and back in my dorm room I asserted her ultimate survival. I had no mental language for the possibility of a motherless world. When the phone rang I knew what was I was being told even though what was being said was babble. I remember wearing a red tank top and walking downtown. But would I really have been alone then? Next my father gripped me as I gasped over him telling me it was time to pull the plug, there was wailing in the grieving room. Old Josephine, young Christine. Chick and I. we walked around the hedge that went around the building where we ended my mother’s braindead suffering, if she was suffering, or if all that had already ended before decision time. I elected not to see her in the hospital bed. I wish I hadn’t seen her face in the coffin, those horrible hands, waxen and caked with covergirl.

She has not an age or occupation, only in my memory she lives and is busy keeping us. We left her for dead - when she was fifty - on the bathroom floor of our house. The last time we got out alive.