As if my phone is a fire in my palm

I huddle around it,

under a blanket to read.

“The next full moon occurs Thursday, Dec. 12, 2019 at 12:12 a.m.

This means December’s full moon, called the Cold Moon, will be at its peak on 12/12 at 12:12. Twelve has significance when it comes to our relative understanding of space and time.

There are 12 months in a year, and our days are split in two groups of 12 hours.

This is also the last full moon of the decade.”

I think to how I was born under a new moon. I hope to die under a full one. My life will have run all it’s phases and I won’t have to come back here.

The fire goes out and my eyes shut.

5:00 am

When I am woken abruptly it sort of feels how I imagine dying feels- but inverse. You’re transported from one space to another and it feels like a being rebooted with a touch of terror.

Laura is holding my phone above me, groggy, she’s saying, “Sweetie.. your mom keeps calling.”

I see the call end and hover away.

Something isn’t right and I immediately worry about my sister.

I walk to the couch in our living room in Rogers Park. It’s very cold.

Yep, my dog, follows me and cuddles up with me under a blanket.

I call my sister first.

She doesn’t answer.

I listen to a voicemail from my mother but it isn’t my mom’s voice. A man named Jeff, who’s apparently her boyfriend, says there’s been an emergency.

Jeff? Oh yeah- she told me about him. He likes baseball like me.

I call him back.

Through fits of sobbing and broken sentences I learn that my mom complained about a headache and just fell over onto the mattress they shared.

He did CPR on her for a long time and the ambulance arrived and she was air lifted to a hospital to Gainesville.

I’m oddly calm and just gathering information.

Is she stable?

He tells me he doesn’t know.

I tell him I’ll reach back out.

Rob and I haven’t talked in years but I text him.

I text my sister.

I text my friends and ask them for help.

My girlfriend has fallen back to sleep so I lay next to her. I start taking deep breathes and obsessively check my phone to see if my sister has called me back.

I roll towards Laura and put my hand on her cheek, “Hey.. hey…”, I whisper.

When she opens her eyes I say, “I’m pretty sure my mom is dead. I think I need to contact people and leave.”

She sits up and hugs me and asks me if I need or want help. I tell her I think she should get some more sleep and I’ll inform her of what’s happening after she wakes up.

I called my sister, aunt, and brother but nobody woke up. Please keep me in the know.

6:00 am

Do you know what’s going on?

Hi, I just talked to the hospital and will have a full update in 30 mins. She was just rolled into the hospital in Gainesville, Fl

All her boyfriend told me was that her heart stopped

Were you able to resuscitate her before the ambulance arrived?

No…. the paramedic couldn’t either….she’s on a difibulator?? from what i understand, she was air lifted to the hospital in Florida.

Ok please keep me posted

Definitely

Do you know the name of the hospital?

I think it’s N E Georgia

So, it’s Gainesville ga not Florida?

UF Health Shanda

Shands*

I’m sorry I was getting conflicting info

I was on the phone with her bf and was very much going into traumatizing detail

I understand

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces that House Democrats will begin drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump. Attorney General William Barr weighs in on protests against police. And Democratic candidate Sen. Kamala Harris drops out of the presidential race.

I scroll for flights with a glassy numbness encapsulating my body.

10:30 am

How did this happen? Was she just sleeping or was there an accident? I’m sorry to be asking so much.

I know you’re also going through a lot right now

1/2 She just got sick and threw up…she said she had a severe headache, I called 911 and she sat up and looked at me and fell over unconscious. She simply stopped breathing….scared me to death all… I could do was CPR until someone got here…. I’m still freaking out were all each other has.

I’m so sorry – thanks for doing everything you could and I bet she’s going to be okay. She’s getting all the help she can right now.

Please don’t take that the wrong way i meant relationship wise..

Oh no. No- I didn’t take it the wrong way

1/2 I know your mother is a fighter…. That’s the kinda faith i have

2/2 in her she will beat this

I’m glad thanks

I’ll be in Florida at 6:30pm, leaving Chicago in 5 hours.

We lived on a continuous horizon. I watched tears slipping from the sides of her dark glasses as we sped by peeling billboards. Gruff like a man and she hardly ever cried. South Carolina smelled like salted molasses on dirty rice.

“Do you think I’m pretty?”

She paused.

“You’re fucked up.”

“I left two years ago, why are you forcing me to come home now?”

10:45 am

How long are you planning on staying in town?

Four people are dead, including the gunman, after a shooting Friday morning at Naval Air Station Pensacola, authorities said. Several other people were injured, including two sheriff’s deputies who engaged the shooter.

The suspect was a member of the Saudi Air Force and an aviation student at the base, officials confirmed at a press conference Friday. CBS News has learned the suspect’s name is Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, although the FBI said they would not confirm a name during a Friday night press conference.

The Pentagon told CBS News that the shooter had been in the country since August 2017 pursuant to a U.S. Air Force Foreign Military Sales training case funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and that he was scheduled to stay until August 2020. He was enrolled in English, basic aviation, and initial pilot training at the station, the Pentagon added.

11:00 am

I just heard about your mother. I’m so sorry. Despite our relationships with our parents over the years losing a parent or going through a medical issue like this is never easy. Sending my love, support and best wishes to you and your siblings right now. ♥️ We love you.

Hello, I’ve received a new phone

I don’t have this number

It’s your cousin, Lauren 🙂

Oh hi!

Thank you for this

I really do appreciate it

Of course. I just heard like an hour ago. I know things are touch and go, and it’s a lot for you to be going through. Just want you know I’m thinking of you all and here for you.

I wish I was closer.

The doctor told me she wasn’t going to show cerebral activity again because too much blood got into her brain. I’m in an uber on the way to O’Hare right now.

She and I started talking like 6 months ago and having reconciliation emails

3:00 pm

I just landed in Atlanta and am eating barbeque. It’s really nice to be back down south. As my oldest friend, you always come to mind when I land down here. There’s something comforting about it

Any word on your mom?

Yeah, I mean she’s dead. I haven’t told anyone yet because I don’t know how to on the phone. The hospital called me and was basically like we’ve run tons of brain scans and she shows no activity. They know I’m coming so they didn’t outright tell me but did say, “There’s nothing else we can do.”

That’s so shitty, I am so sorry. I can call you and am totally here to keep texting too.

I’m dissociating too much for a phone conversation, but I love you

There was a time I could say no one I knew had died. It was before high school. The first girl I was in love with overdosed a few years after I left SC. I’ve had multiple friends from high school pass away. In recent years, I’ve befriended two people that I really loved who committed suicide. Oh, and my sweet friend who died of cancer when I was 22 and she was 25. We were so angry at the end.

None of this is to imply that life never came to an end around me as a kid, but death wasn’t reckoned in my home because grief was seen as weak. We had lost a lot of pets and were never allowed to cry about losing them. When I was ten years old, I sat on the kitchen counter and watched my mom make chicken tenders for dinner. I can’t remember how we got on the topic, but I remember picking the scabs on my knees as she spoke. My bangs hung in front of my eyes through a backwards Yankees cap. She told me that she had two abortions since I had been born. She confided in her child that she had all four of us in five years. In my eyes, her being 29 made her old so what she was saying didn’t compute. She was sad though and seemed relieved to tell anyone that she had done this. This didn’t seem like a death because nobody died but my mom’s sadness felt like death. When she told me, it felt sort of the way I had felt two years earlier after I found out John Candy had died. I remember sobbing as quietly as I could on the top bunk, so my father wouldn’t hear. It was shameful and opaque sort of like her secret. Grief wears all kinds of clothes.

6:30 pm

Mom’s boyfriend offered to come pick you up. I’m shaken up a bit at the hospital.

I’ve been here since 3:00pm

He really wanted to

I am sorry for his hat

Omg, why?

7:00

This guy is wearing a gas station version Trump hat and I’m in his truck. I had to move my mom’s purse to get in.

Her pink Trump hat is glaring at me on the dashboard. How am I going to do this?

So the hospital has been in touch with you though. They’ve been giving you information now?

He nods.

Okay. I’m really sorry.

They did one last test.

Yeah?

Okay. And in this test they concentrated, uh, oxygen into her body and if it reacted then her mind wasn’t gone and her body didn’t react. So the doctor declared her dead.. brain dead.

Um, they said they’d keep her on the ventilator for 24 hours its all they can do. I said, well, the family would be here before then. So. Just make her look comfortable, at least please. I mean, her family’s coming, so they made her comfortable. It’s not pretty sight. She’s got tubes coming out everywhere. It’s downright scary.

Okay.

I  want you to be a little prepared,  its overwhelming to me when I got there–

Has my sister seen her yet?

Yeah yeahs she’s there. Your sister is in there holding her hand and crying.. doing what she needs to do.

***********************************************************************************

The hospital in Gainesville, Florida is what people mean when they talk about purgatory. This 24/7 glaringly white sonic light of a giant space is filled with cubbies that people get stuck in before they can leave. This is the in between place. As I walked into the sanitized cubicle surrounded by glass where my mother lied, the first thing I saw was my sister sitting at the end of her bed. She was hunched over and looked like a puppy waiting for their person to wake up. Because my mother is an organ donor the bags, ventilator, bottles and tubes she’s bound to offer her a false state of continuance. I could feel my feet swelling because I had chugged a glass of wine at the airport when I landed, and I wondered if her entire body was bloated under the white-sheeted agony I saw before my eyes. It was in this thought that I break down and cry out, “Mom..mom.. momma..” I walk into a corner furthest away from everything in the room. I cry so hard that I stop breathing for moments and all I can hear is her heart rate and the crunchy source of her oxygen. My sister comes to me and holds me but I am numb. I see two nurses and her boyfriend in the hallway. They won’t make eye contact with me and all look as if I am a male banshee heralding the death of the mother. My sister says, “She was pronounced dead at 3:00pm right before I arrived.”

DAY 2

8:45 am

A Florida man got hot and heavy with a “Frozen” toy, cops said.

Cody Christopher Meader allegedly had his way with the stuffed snowman Olaf, from the popular Disney flick, ejaculating on the doll and sticking it back on the shelf at a Target in St. Petersburg.

When he was done, Meader apparently moved on to a large stuffed unicorn and began dry humping it, police said, according to The Smoking Gun.

9:00 am

Are you awake?

yeah

Cool, we’ll pick you up at 10:00am.

We want to get barbeque before going back to her.

Over a breakfast, that is usually lunch, my brother pushes us to let him buy our food. I feel uncomfortable because my family, especially the men in it, like to push kindness on you just to throw it in your face if you have a disagreement later. I get pulled pork and sweet tea. My sister is wearing my yellow Slits band t-shirt because she forgot to pack clothes.

Nothing good happens to me in Florida.

I lived here as a child, and this same brother, 13 months younger than me, and I used to roam around a trailer park covered in dirt and Kool Aid.

I got top surgery in Florida in 2014.

20 mins after waking up a nurse threw me in my care taker’s car and told Caroline, “Don’t baby him. He asked for this, he wanted this.”

I was allergic to the anesthesia though and every time I vomited or dry heaved I could feel the wounds across my chest stretch. A few days into healing my father tried to contact me out of the blue because he had almost died in a surgery himself,

and my mother had left him.

He felt entitled to my time even though we hadn’t spoke in 6 years.

Here now, the three of us are, lacking juice, milk, or pancakes and I ask my siblings if mom’s death will propel them to go to therapy. My sister says she can’t ever see herself comfortably talking to a stranger and my brother immediately laughs and starts to make fun of me. He tells me therapists will tell me I am fucked up because that’s how they get paid and he says that if therapy worked, I wouldn’t have had to be in it for a decade.

I pretend like I don’t hear him and change the subject.

I tell him I am applying to grad school and might end up in New Orleans but hoped to get into NYU. Most of my body loosens. My shoulders stiffen even as I am trying to let what he said go. He changed the subject to his fiancé. He’s very proud to be getting married and is speaking about it like an accomplishment, which is something I can not relate with.

He tells us he lucked out because through marriage he will own a bar. He already lives about this bar with her rent free. I feel frustrated and yet empathetic.

I am feeling paternal suddenly and missing my little brother. I loved him my whole life, and I still do, but I can’t recognize him anymore.

I can feel how much he hates me.

A lifetime away, drunk in the mountains and listening to Bob Dylan, the crispness of a North Carolina autumn can cut through any self-inflicted haze.

She said, “Your brother is in jail, your other brother is an alcoholic, and your sister just over dosed on heroine. I feel like killing myself. I feel like an awful mother.”

I paused.

“This is probably all of your fault for staying with him.”

we, of mature age, hereby certify (1) that I/we am/are the children

I/we agree to hold you, your servants and employees blameless and harmless, from any and all liability whatsoever: also for any loss or damage to said cremated remains

Whether your loved one made the decision to become an organ donor by joining the registry, or you made the decision as a family, you have supported something that is nothing less than heroic. In the midst of your tragedy and grief, you have given other patients hope for a renewed life through organ transplantation. You have also allowed something positive to come from your tragic and painful situation.

1:00 pm

My mom’s childhood best friend contacted me this morning. She asked me to fight the doctors on her being pronounced dead. She told me that she’s still in there and they don’t know what they are talking about.

She had sort of a point, but also not really one at all.

What does brain dead even mean? If you believe in the “soul” does its leave your body just because your brain stops working and they keep you on life support? If her friend was right- she’d be trapped in a body that can’t function on its own and she can’t wake up.

As I’m looking at my mom now, I am imagining what her line of sight was when she died. It’s like a 90’s Mac monitor and all the sudden someone ripped the cord from the wall. In an instant, darkness followed by dizzying colors and familiar noise.

Does that mean she’s gone?

I believe she has died but I also believe she’s in the room.

I decide to test this theory and start to talk about a memory I have of her when I was 5 years old. I was sitting on her lap in a house without electricity. I begged her to leave my father and asked her not to make us move. All of the sudden the machines connected to her and around us starting beeping and flaring up.

My sister looks horrified and my brother kind of vomits, “WHAT? CAN YOU HEAR US??”

Have you ever felt like a person was sweating through their words? This is how he sounds when he can’t control something. Maybe it’s just his fear that is inspiring the machines to explode in a cacophony of death. Fear is death no matter how much you avoid the truth.

I change the subject when the doctors come in.

I start thinking about how similar me and my brother stand and hold ourselves. I notice how he tells stories and I hate it and I mostly hate it because that’s how I speak which, subsequently, is how our father speaks.

Thankfully, I don’t yell at ghosts though because I don’t want to scare them away like he does.

3:00 pm

After we said goodbye to my mother one final time. My brother, sister and I drove an hour south to the home my mother died in. My mom’s boyfriend says he’d be around to let us in, gather some of her things, and take her cat home to my niece. Now in Palatka, the boyfriend is nowhere to be found and he isn’t answering his phone. My sister quickly becomes enraged. I tried to calm her down by saying we’d figure something out, and while I am not one to call the police, I don’t know what to say and but speak up.. “I don’t know maybe we can show the cops a death certificate the thing and they can ask the middle-class white southern landlords to let us in.”

My brother snapped his head to the backseat, “You act like you fucking hate cops, but I actually hate cops. So no, we won’t be calling the police that is such a stupid fucking idea.”

I agree it wasn’t the best idea and try to let everyone know that I was just trying to reassure my sister that we’d figure it out and everything is going to be okay.

My sister stayed in Palatka one summer with my mother after a breakup 4 or 5 years before. She tells us that she worked one shift at this Trump loving biker bar that both my mom and her boyfriend loved. My sister quit because she was sexually harassed more than she ever had been working on Bourbon Street. When we get to the bar, the boyfriend was most likely in a black out and he’s sitting at a picnic table. My brother, who just yelled at me about the cops, starts talking about how cool these people at the bar look and he was going to be the one to get the boyfriend.

I ask him, “Why do you think a bunch of Trump supporters look cool.. what about all of the faux patriotism?”

He laughs, “Just because I look like this (a punk) doesn’t mean I am not patriotic.”

I am not patriotic and think loving this country the way it stands, and with knowledge of how it was created, makes him a boot licker. I am feeling resentful at his lack of nuance and self awareness.

When he leaves the car, my sister turns to the back seat and says, “This is why you shouldn’t have invited him to come to South Carolina with us. He’s stoned cold sober and acting like this already.”

I feel my face blush and say I can take care of myself but was conflicted about someone who likes Trump supporters and blasted me for not hating the cops enough.

A large part of me knows I made a mistake. He’s cracking slowly and showing me how inconsistent and aggressive he is. Eventually the smallest prick will make him tumble.

I asked my sister, “Does he know I feel the way I do because I am anti-racist?” She says, “That’s not what it is for him. He just doesn’t like when anyone else has power over him. It’s not the same and I think him coming home is a really bad idea, Basil.” I tell her I’ll try to talk him into going back to New Orleans at mom’s house. When my brother returns to the car he tells me he took a double shot of Tanqueray. His demeanor is different. He has this shaky confidence in his body language while before he had a wall up. He smiles and says to me, “I tipped the bartender $15.”

I nodded, “That’s really nice. Is the boyfriend coming out?”

In almost a suave tone he writes me off, “Yeah, yeah. He’ll be out. Don’t worry about it.”

I consider bashing my face into the front seat and screaming at the top of my lungs. Maybe I break his knees. I’ve long fantasized humbling my brothers this way and making it so they can’t hurt others.

I shake my head up and down instead and stare out the window.

I am trying to find the breathe on my nostrils.

5:00pm

Hey honey just checking on you

Omfg

Omg what?

We just left my mom’s house , she died on a fucking air mattress and her boyfriend misgendered me intentionally and maybe he took her disability check? I don’t fucking know.

Oh god

He also called Newport’s “N-word Killers” and my brother fucking laughed

I’m so sorry

Oh my god!!!

My brother got stoned af with him and was taking shots while me and my sister were packing

That sucks

As I was going through my mom’s stuff, I found her vibrator and had to like very discreetly wrap it up and throw it away for many reasons. Mainly because only moments before I found it, the boyfriend told my brother how great our mother was in bed!

He also randomly told me that Trump loves trans people more than he does, so yeah I feel very safe??

I’m so so sorry. Jesus. You’re not with him now right?

Right. We’re on the way to South Carolina with my mom’s cat.