Life Without Tom

“Can I come over?” I asked my girlfriend Fran, staring blankly at the message on my computer screen. It was three months after Tom had started treatment.  We’d seen him three times, the last time just two weeks ago.  He’d seemed better, less dependent on his oxygen machine and able to actually greet us at [...]

Visiting A Sick Friend

“You look so great!” Kelly enthused, the pitch of her voice rising so artificially high that I cringed. She had turned on her personal brand of “hospital charm”, the same charm I’d used all during my mother’s illness and when I visited my ex’s father in the hospital after serious open heart surgery.  I had [...]

Worried

“I’m tired,” Tom said sheepishly, sitting down as the crowd at the local senior center dwindled. My girlfriends and I had been invited by our first selectman to join him for a campaign appearance at the town senior center; this was a tough crowd for anyone running for our local board of education.  Since we [...]

The Price of Winning

We stood around the kitchen island, toasting our victory in this year’s budget battle. It had been hard fought.  We’d had two elections where the votes came within several hundred votes, but we still had been unable to convince voters that a small tax increase was better than the cuts that were inevitable if the [...]

Gone

February 13, 1993 My mother shifted under the blankets we had wrapped around her lap and shoulders, a sign that the morphine was wearing off and that she was coming out of that drug induced haze that gave her the only relief from her struggle for air.  I looked over to my sister, who picked [...]

The Will To Live

The look on Paul’s face said everything that I knew but had not allowed myself to think about over the last three days. Paul, the husband of my friend Jewel, was standing at my front door.  It was Friday evening, the darkness spreading early in the cold February night.  My house was loud and bright; [...]

Signs

Febraury 12, 1993 It was the middle of the night. My mother was seated semi upright on the sofa. She couldn’t lay flat any more without the fluids in her lungs overwhelming her into a coughing fit. She sounded asleep; her breathing was now quieter, and more regular than it had been earlier. Her eyes [...]

We Just…Knew

February 11, 1993 I went to work the next day, a Thursday, when my mother had slept through the night uneventfully.  She’d been in good spirits considering the addition of the hospital bed and table and commode. I went to school and waited for the phone call that never came. My old choir teacher (now [...]

Downhill

February 10, 1993 It was four or five in the morning. Dark. Quiet except for the whirr of the oxygen machine in the corner. All of a sudden, I heard my mother rustling on the sofa across the room. She was trying to get up. I popped off of the loveseat where I’d been half [...]

Last Times Are Hard

February 8, 1993 Monday morning.   I liked getting up nice and early these days so that I knew no matter what happened while I was trying to get out of the house in the morning, I was going to be able to absorb the bumps. It didn’t really matter that I’d been sleeping on the [...]