Countdown to Enlightenment
By: Satchel Edmonds
Tags: Memoir, Moms, Family, Mwc Death

They tried to bury my mum in an ice bucket.

You know the kind — the pleather, in-room freebie at the Holiday Inn. If you’re at a Holiday Inn right now, pack that bucket. Someday, it’ll save you 5000 bucks.

The people at funeral home called it “a popular choice for those who like(d) simple elegance.” They called it an urn.

It’s a fucking ice bucket.

~

My mum died two weeks after my 28th birthday. I’d had a feeling that if I ever left her, she’d die. She devoted her life to my dad and me. Leaving was both a betrayal and a rite of passage. I moved to Mexico, went to the mountains on a trip, got a job slinging drinks, writing stories, and painting a carpet — actually painting a carpet — with a former Olympic figure skater named T.

I was working hard to be starving, artful, bohemian, and it seemed impossible to cultivate hardship in Toronto, with two middle-class parents 14 blocks away with a well-stocked kitchen and a bounty of love and support.

When I phoned home to announce I’d gotten a job with the local paper, uncharacteristically, she told me she wouldn’t visit. I carried that hurt with me for 12 years until I woke up one morning and realized that must have been when she knew.

And I should’ve known, too. Because it was written as a black year from the moment a mouse became a bat and took flight in my bedroom, one minute past midnight on the night of my birthday. But, like I said, I was painting a carpet — an actual carpet — for this flamboyant former athlete, with his litany of secret addictions, holding nightly salons with dukes and shirtless servants and elderly genderless painters.

I needed to make my life worth writing about, and this place, it seemed, dripped with content, possibility, and artistic despair.

I stayed lost in that Mexican haunt — a semi-legitimate bohemian, a passable barkeep, an under-aged retiree. I lived on a rooftop with a ceiling balanced on a broomstick. Utopia.

No one here thought much of the future. This was where you arrived to live in the present or, for some, the past. All I knew was that someday, too soon to contemplate, I’d be 35, life would be over, and I’d rely on this time for a book deal to fuel my dotage.

I carried an unshakeable sense of foreboding. A dirge had slid its way into my body. I found myself humming, singing it, like a mantra. “yea, though I walk…” They weren’t my words. They’d drifted in from somewhere. Years at an Anglican school, perhaps. Or maybe it was just because it was such a bloody time. I was teaching metallurgy at a Mexican day camp full of expat kids. Every day, some American tween erupted into a fountain of blood.

And on one of those days, as if by grim poetry, geysers spurting by the tin cutters, while a Hurricane named Katrina picked up speed on the Atlantic, I got a call from T saying a family friend had called, tracked me down somehow, and said that my mum was in hospital. It had been flu. Now it was jaundice. Her organs were shuddering, and my dad, who was always dramatic but never inconvenient said, through the hiss of a poor connection, “it’s not looking good, Shorts”. And I didn’t believe him, so when I asked, out of habit not intention, if he thought I should come home and he said, “yes”, and then, “tonight, if you can,” I collapsed on the floor of that Mexican internet café, wrapped my arms around my knees, and rocked, as every moment in my life collided into one, and for one defining and ruinous moment, I glimpsed and then was swallowed by God.

Outside, I stood still, watching light bounce off a crack in the sidewalk. I focused every ounce of power I had on a message to send across time and space.

Stay with me, you’re safe, I’m coming.

She waited for me to arrive. Her brother was there. She watched him now with the devotion of a little sister. We’d not seen him in years, but he’d been the first to appear. My dad held me as he started to shake. I stood still, as layers of time began to slip and muddle. My uncle held a will in front of my mum as she struggled to hold a pen and mumbled something about leaving me a bit of money to write. I looked at my hands and back at my mum. “I brought you a planter that looks like a chicken,” I said, before crawling into bed with her and hugging her like my life depended on it, because it always had.

And, five days later, as I slept beside her, she had a small heart attack, and I called my dad, and he came running, literally, running, up the dreary yellowed hallway, desperate, wild, hopeful, and still, thank God, alive.

His heart had broken with hers. He’d spent a day and a night in the ER as cardiologists monitored a rapidly expanding aneurysm in his aorta. He cried on the gurney, said he’d take care of this later. For now, he had a more important place to be. I was five floors up, sitting alone in purple pyjamas on a hallway floor, as doctors measured a tube for my mother’s tired lungs.

Life was transforming, but I floated in a childlike feeling of safety. For this moment, and this one, I had them with me, in the same building, both within reach, everything still possible.

“Is she okay, Shorts? Am I in time, Shorts?” Running in black Gucci loafers, knee socks, dress pants, and a 400 dollar turtleneck, or, as he called it, ‘casual’. It was 6 in the morning. And then 6:25, and how things can change, in life, so quickly, with such certainty… I looked at the clock. Willed it backward. 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5, you only need a second for a fucking miracle and man, did I think our family of three deserved one of those. But then again, we’d been living one.

We circled around her, the two of us, stroked her hands, held each others’, whispered in her ears, hummed to her — the dirge had lifted. We shielded her from the orderlies as they disconnected wires and yanked plugs from walls with a brisk, careless boredom I still work to imagine away. We watched her leave, the most glorious spirit we’d ever know. We loved her with a power that became its own emotion.

And then, in the deep, blank silence, one thought overcame me. One gnawing, lingering thought. Did we just give up on her?

There was nowhere to be. My dad and I wandered out, back into the yellowed halls, the fluorescent lights, and there were her friends, all gathered at 7 am, called or driven by a force they’d felt but couldn’t name.

They brought offerings. They’re distant now, but I remember J’s pastry cake. We gave my mum’s brother a hug. And there was my best friend, C, alone, in the hallway, holding three cups of coffee on a tray. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t yet know, she just followed us down the elevator and into the parking lot, where, silently, my dad and I split a cigarette, even though I didn’t really smoke. And we drove up from the underground, and as we did, the garage door rose overhead, and a curtain of yellow butterflies appeared, to assure us that we were not alone.