A Few Days Ago

One of those countless, endless night in the hospital I sat on the bed, holding my mother’s withered hand and feeling her exaggerated pulse every few seconds. I am not an emotional person. I do not cry. I had not cried until Dale came into the room.

“How, you doin’, Jilly Bean?” He addressed my unconscious mother, “How’s my girl?” He cradled her head, gently touching the side of her cheek. “Jill,” he said, “I’m giving you twenty more minutes to nap and then I am going to make you walk around the nurses’ station with me and you know I will. Doesn’t matter if you’re kicking and screaming…” his face softened and his playful smile melted a little at the bitter sweetness of their old jokes. I watched his long fingers stroke my mum’s wispy brown hair as he sunk into the stiff, colorless hospital chair next to the bed. “Not this time, girl.” He whispered, “It’s alright though. We’ve made enough memories.”

The character of Dale had formed early in my life when, at fourteen, he was the first openly gay man I had ever been in close contact with. During my first encounter with him as my mother’s nurse, he frightened me a little. His feminine airs and bubbly personality were something that I did not know how to process. Over the years, though, he proved himself worthy. He made my mum do things she did not want to do in order to make her better. He would kidnap her from her room for a McDonalds run at two in the morning. He hid in her room to do paperwork so that the other nurses would not be able to find him. He made my mother laugh and kept her spirits high throughout all of those long, miserable weeks and months on the sixth floor of Strong Memorial Hospital. He changed his hair all the time. My sisters and I made a game of guessing which color it would be with each visit. He gave my brother things like plastic tubing and rubber gloves to play with and he told the most outrageous stories.

This final visit of Dale to my mother was different…but it wasn’t. He told the same stories; talked to her the same way, called her the same pet names, and told her that she was the most stubborn person he had ever met. But instead of directing his words to her, or to my grandmother, or to the rest of the room, he was directing them at me.

My mother loved me. I know that. My mother loved me so much but I often did not feel it. She rarely showed me approval and she often questioned my hobbies, the way I dressed, my choice of friends. I knew she loved me, but it was hard to internalize that because she never told me that she was proud of me.

I sat on the side of the bed that night, my small weight barely rippling the bleached, white hospital blanket and my hands in Dale’s as he told me words I had wished to hear my mother say so many times. “Kate,” Dale said to me, looking me straight in the eyes, “Your mum was so proud of you. How many nights I would sit in here and she would talk about her dreams for you and how you were going to be such a great chef.” His words have run together now, inside of my head, they all ran down hill into a puddle of shining memory. But they are something that I intend to bottle and treasure forever. I felt like he was making sure. Making sure that although my mum always said things to me like, “why are you wearing that?”, “why can’t you just try harder?”, “why aren’t you more like your sisters?”, “why did you cut your hair?”; although she asked me so many questions that almost burned through the pit of my stomach, she had been proud of me and had loved me for who I was. After constant battering by her harsh questions and comments I so often felt that I was letting her down because I wasn’t competitive, I wasn’t beautiful, I wasn’t what she expected her daughter to be.

“Kate,” Dale said to me, his gentle smell of musk and cigarettes brushing my face, “your mum spent so many nights telling me how special you are. How you are such an individual. How she know you will do great things. All she wants for you is that you are happy and that you finish college. She told me that, honey. She said that to me so many times on nights when I would take her outside with me on my break. Promise me, Kate, promise me that you won’t let her down and that you will get me an invitation to that college graduation because I’m going to be there for her.”

My mum is dead. I never got to tell her that I am changing my major to counseling and that I will never be a great chef like she wanted for me. I never got to tell her that I want to pursue a doctorate degree and work with middle school girls and tattoo a chrysalis on my shoulder. The truth of the matter is that if I had told her any of these things she would have told me to aim a little lower, to do something more sensible, and that my skin was not meant to be art. But it seems there would be a lot that she wasn’t telling me too. And those are the things which seem to matter the most.