Taking comfort where you can find it

When she came to the phone last night she sounded so fragile, so near to tears and so bewildered.

"I did it wrong," she said. I didn't ask her to tell me what she'd done. My sister had already told me in an earlier phone conversation that Mom had used a pen knife. "If she'd really wanted to kill herself she'd have used the scissors. They were sharp," my sister said.

I found myself wondering if she'd made a mess of her clothing. Was there blood on her sheets? Mom told me that the nursing home staff had called for an ambulance and then she was at the psychiatric hospital. "I thought it was taking a long time to get there and then the driver said we weren't going to the regular hospital," she said.

Mom feels a need to visit the hospital on a regular basis. When she stayed with me, before we moved to Florida, we averaged a trip to the emergency room about every three weeks. She'd go and the staff would hook her up to all kinds of equipment and they'd monitor her for an hour or two and then send her home. She'd be okay for a few weeks and then something would trigger another anxiety attack and her heartrate would jump and she'd have to go again.

Invariably, it happened over a weekend, when she couldn't see her doctor. My husband felt sorry for her but he used to get very frustrated by what he thought was a waste of time and resources. "Do you think you're having a heart attack?" he'd ask her sternly and she'd tell him no. "Then you don't need to go to the E.R. Emergency rooms are for emergencies. You're not in danger of dying so you don't need to go."

Sometimes a talking to was what she wanted and she'd subside for a day or two. But sometimes she'd insist she needed a doctor to look at her. When my husband took her he always fumed a little afterward when the medical staff would send her home without having changed anything in her list of medicines. He kicked himself for giving in to her panic.

I remember a story Mom told me about the time right after she'd given birth to one of my older brothers. She was hemorrhaging badly and suddenly she could see herself below where the doctors and nurses were busily trying to save her life. She floated up and away and then saw a light and started toward it. Then she was stopped. I can never remember who it was she said stopped her progress toward the light. It was two or three people, I remember that, and one of them was a saint, I remember her telling me that, too.

She said these people stopped her and told her she had to go back, that it wasn't time for her to go yet. She said she argued with them about this, that she wanted to go on toward the light but that they were insistent that she couldn't, not yet. And so she went back, she said, but she was angry that she'd been turned away.

She would have been around 35 years old then. I always think about the pull of that light on her and how powerful it must've been to tempt her away from a family of now five boys and a husband. Or, alternatively, how unhappy she must've been to want to leave so soon.

Maybe when you're freed from your body you leave your emotional, glandular self along with it. As her child I try to think up reasons for her to want to leave me and this one is as comforting as any other.