What I Wanted in That Second - Melody Cryns

I wanted her to live – I wanted Mom to keep fighting and not give up. Instead when I arrived to her apartment with the four kids right before Christmas 1996, I found my mother sitting on her bed in that blue and white flannel nightgown she always wore going through all of her “junk” jewelry, as Mom always called it. Mom looked gaunt, thinner than I’d ever seen her, and she had stopped dying her hair so it had turned snow white and fell only below her shoulders. She still looked so young though with those huge gray blue eyes that were exactly like my older daughter Melissa’s who usually wore loads of eye liner at the age of 14 to make her eyes look even bigger – and sometimes scarier.

She and Melissa were two peas in a pod, I thought.

“I’m just wondering if there’s anything in this pile you want!” my mother said so matter-of-factly as if she was getting ready to go on a long journey and talk about the weather. “I’m going through everything.”

“Mom, why are you going through everything? There’s still time, plenty of time…please?”

Baby Megan who was only four years old tugged at my arm. “Mommy I have to go to the bafroom.”

I grabbed Megan’s hand and took her down the hallway of the apartment my mother said she hated because she was surrounded by old people – low income housing for seniors. “I’m going to die here!” she’d said dramatically just a year before. That thought horrified me because a year was when I got that fateful call from my mother telling me that the cancer was terminal.

“I hope you’re sitting down dear” Mom had said on the phone, sounding like this was just another one of her casual conversations.

I hadn’t been sitting down. I was standing in the kitchen and me and the kids had just burst into the house.

Damn it, damn it! I thought after I hung up with my mom. She’s gotta fight! She’s strong. She always taught me to be independent and strong. She can and will fight this.

When I walked back into Mom’s bedroom, Melissa, dark, dramatic and 14, hissed at me, “Mother, I hate you. You never tell me the truth and I hate you.”

“What?” I looked at my mother who still sat on the bed going through her jewelry like an excited kid and not like a 63-year-old woman with cancer, and then at Melissa who stood in the corner.

Mom sighed. “I just told her the truth. She needs to know…”

“The truth? The truth is, you’ve gotta keep fighting Mom, don’t give up. Please. I know you can do this.”

I looked over at the nightstand next to Mom’s bed which contained a ceramic Buddha and a cross and a book which Mom grabbed, called “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” and the ashtray filled with cigarette butts…Mom’s death sentence, I thought.

“Why didn’t you tell me Grandma was going to die!” Melissa yelled. “Why? I needed to know…why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because…because…” I melted down on to the bed like a small child not having any idea what to say, because I didn’t believe it myself so I thought maybe it wasn’t so… or did I really just want to protect my kids? Who knows?

“Come sit here,” Mom said looking right at Melissa, “And we’ll talk about this.” Melissa obediently ran over to Mom’s bed and sat down and Mom put her arm around her. “It’s okay…dying isn’t as bad as you think…”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran out of the room past my boys who looked at me funny, threw myself on to the couch with the needlepoint bright colored pillows my mother had made in the 1960’s, and cried.

Here’s to you mom…October 27, 1932 to January 29, 1997…