Oh, all the clever things I should say to you

therealljidol Week 7: Bupkis

"The worst part," she tells me when we're alone for the first time since I arrived with Dad last week, "is waking up in the morning and not knowing where you are or why you're there. When you open your eyes that first time after a night's sleep, you expect to see the ceiling you've been meaning to patch for the last decade, the dresser from the bedroom set your mother bought you when you first moved into the house forty years ago, and the tape player that's been broken since you dropped it in '96."

I stay silent and try to keep still, but nursing homes make me uneasy and my leg bounces wildly from nervous energy. She doesn't comment on my restlessness like I expect her to - I wonder, briefly, if she even notices that it's happening, and whether or not she knows it's me and not my mother or sisters. I can never tell anymore.

"It's so strange." She pauses to clear her throat, the same high-pitched hem hem sound I've heard her make since I can remember. She continues, "It's so strange, the things you think about in that moment when you don't know what you've been doing for the last four or five years. Terrifying, in a word. You've got all these memories of chasing after your little brothers and helping Mother make Sunday dinner for the cousins, of going to college and then graduate school and traveling and teaching and taking care of nieces and nephews, and then - nothing. It all goes away and you're left with nothing."

She tries to turn her head to look at me, but her body is so weak at this point that she barely manages it. She gives me a wide, toothy grin (and years later I'll see the same smile on my nephew's face and clutch at my sister's arm and cry because I miss her so much) and chuckles, warm and low. "Then, of course, it all comes rushing back to you. Doctors visiting, selling the house, the first assisted living place, updating your will, the nursing home, being confined to your bed, making sure you get to see everyone one last time. I practically ran this family for half a century, you'd think I'd be a little better at managing these things."

I think she wants me to laugh, but I know if I start I won't be able to stop before I dissolve into tears.

"I wouldn't worry too much about it, kid," she says after a while. "You have the whole world until then."