Motherless Children

In my dream I ran to answer the ringing phone. I picked up the receiver and said, "Hello?" but there was nothing on the other end of the line and the phone was still ringing. As lucidity crept in, I became aware that I was dreaming and that the phone downstairs was ringing. That didn't make any sense, either. The phone doesn't ring in the middle of the night. The only reason a phone rings in the middle of the night is for Bad News, and Bad News only happens to Other People. That thought brought me fully awake. The phone was still ringing. My dad and mom had gone to Detroit to race a horse, and should have been home by now, but why weren't they answering the phone? At seventeen, I had not even begun to exhibit any signs of responsibility, but I realized it was going to be my job to answer that damn ringing phone. I took the stairs slowly, hoping that it was just a wrong number and whoever it was would give up and hang up, but that fucking phone kept ringing. I finally got to it and picked it up, and had a hard time placing the voice at first. I could tell it was a voice I knew, and the voice said "Is this Vince?" so I knew it was somebody who knew me, but there was a startling amount of fear and sadness in the voice, and that was what was weird. It was a voice that I only associated with confidence, authority, and no intense emotions besides anger. It was my father.

He spilled it out as quickly as he could before he really lost it. My mother had collapsed at the race track. They had taken her to the hospital. He didn't know anything else. My Aunt Ann was on her way to pick up me and my sister, so I better wake Melanie up and get us ready to go.

I don't remember many details from the next several days. Just sitting at my mother's bedside, listening to the machine that was making her breathe, hoping against hope. The doctors explained what they could -- my mother had a brain aneurysm which had burst, her brain was covered with blood, it would be a couple of days before they could give us any prognosis. So I sat there for several days, watching her breathe. I noticed that every once in a while, my mom would take a deep breath, and the respirator would display the word "sigh." I latched on to this as a sign that everything was going to be alright; if my mother could sigh, she must be alive and in control of her breathing.

So I was stunned when the doctors gathered my dad, my sister and myself in a room and told us the most recent EKG showed no brain activity at all. She was brain dead. I thought they were looking at the wrong results, or they were smoking wacky weed, or they were playing some cruel trick on our family. I asked about the sighs. They all but called me silly boy. The respirator was programmed to force a sigh every now and then to keep the lungs open and unfilled. The doctors just wanted to be clear -- there was no hope. They could keep her alive with machines, but she would never wake up, never eat or breathe on her own. Or we could pull the plug.

Looking at my mother, whose always rail thin frame had become bloated by intravenous fluid intake, feeling embarrassed and bereft of hope because I had placed so much hope on those sighs, and fighting the exhaustion that several days of bedside vigil hundreds of miles from home inevitably brings, I just wanted it to be over. I don't know what was going through my dad's mind or my sister's mind, but they also voted to pull the plug. We did agree to allow my mother's organs to be donated (I later found out her kidney was transplanted), so they pulled the plug, harvested the organs, and declared my mother dead on Friday, July 13th, 1983.

And that was the first time that my life completely changed.