Full Exposure
by Wanda Fleming
Special to Skirt Magazine, Atlanta
December 2007
“Cover me please. Just cover me.”
No matter how much my mother yanks and finagles the tie, the hospital gown slips open revealing bare skin. The first time it happens, I lower my eyes. As we walk to the bathroom, she roots and bunches the threadbare fabric. The hem hikes up brushing a lattice of green and bruised red veins.
“We could use my robe belt,” she whispers.
I kneel and wrap it around her waist to keep the gown closed.
In the first years of married life, my mother changed more than 25,000 diapers: my siblings’, and mine. She viewed and lathered six sets of baby bottoms, patted and powdered six sets of inner thighs. Now role reversal had begun to seep in. Like imaging dye on an X-ray, it had entered and was coursing at will.
I playfully grab my mother’s hand and feel the jutting wrist bone. I kiss her face and sense a hollow slackness. Arms crossed, I lean into the hospital wall and interrogate her doctor.
Conducting his evening rounds, he smiles serenely, like a man for whom a wife and a warm meal wait. When he speaks, the gently parsed words slip from his mouth like Scrabble tiles sliding off their rack onto the corridor floor: weakened...vascular...system.
That’s what he says. This is what I hear, “Her heart is decimated, shot, kaput.”
From what he can tell, over the last two decades my mother has suffered several small heart attacks. Before I research the drug interactions of her newly prescribed pills, before our roles ever truly switch, my mother has another. She dies chasing her breath....
Read the rest here at SKIRT magazine:
http://www.skirt.com/node/1587
