“My love, I sing to you, this lonely road runs straight to Hell…”

A♣

 

 

 

 

I remember her shaking like glasses in the bar car of a rumbling 19th century train.

 

The cancer had rotted her brain.

 

She’d no idea who or where she was.

 

All she could do was sit, filling a bag with piss and blood.

 

I imagine her world was naught but confusion and pain.

 

 

 

 

I leaned over her seated shell as it trembled, kissed the top of her head, whispering:

 

I’ll miss you, mom.

 

I don’t think my father, brother or anyone else in the hospice room heard me say it.

 

I don’t care if they did.

 

 

 

Hours later, they put her in a bed and doped her up completely.

 

Even then, she slept fitfully.

 

I imagine my brother and I fighting, standing on opposite side of her as she lay dying between us, didn’t help.

 

Ironic, since I suspect she played us all against one another for most of our lives.

 

I hope I’m wrong.

 

 

 

Hours afterwards, the hospice nurse came to us in the waiting room; my mother had reached her final minutes, we were told.

 

My father and I went back into her room.

 

My brother stayed out.

 

He couldn’t bear to watch.

 

To this day, I don’t blame him.

 

(Not that I could if I wanted to; he hasn’t spoken to me in eight years.)

 

As she held the stethoscope to my mother’s slowing heart, the nurse left one of the earpieces hanging loose.

 

I can still hear my mother’s last three heartbeats echo off the hospice room walls.

 

She’d played rhythm for her own dirge.

 

 

 

I recall my father and brother crying.

 

I did, too.

 

Somewhat.

 

I also felt elation.

 

She was dead; she was free.

 

Free, at last.

 

Thank God almighty, free at last.

 

After suffering more agony than I’d wish on my worst enemy.

 

I’d shoot you in the fucking gut to empty your bowels and circulatory system, then roll the doomed, reeking mess in a g0ddamn ditch to fill it before I’d want that fate for you.

 

 

 

Now, I’ve seen plenty of Perdition.

 

But that’s the best view I’ve ever gotten of it.

 

Trust me; that’s saying something.

 

But, as my father once told me – well prior to that extended nightmare – and I put in my first book:

 

Life goes on. Sometimes that’s the horror of it.

 

 

 

If that experience taught me one other thing, it taught me this:

 

A woman, a job, a friend, your fondest memories…

 

It doesn’t matter.

 

You’ll lose ’em all.

 

One way or another.

 

And I know – in some fashion – she wasn’t the only one that died in that room.

 

 

A♣