Heaving air from my frustrated lungs, I stood so angrily in our living room. “I don’t want to hear about your ‘what needs to be done once I’m gone’ list! I?—”
She put her palms together, pleading with my deaf ears. “But, there’s so little time. Baby, you need to know?—”
“Don’t you get it?” I winced in utter pain. “All I know is nothing matters but you! For real!”
I also wanted to scream that she was an ER nurse. How the hell did she miss all the signs of her illness? The answer was too palpable to hear. She’d been consumed with keeping me safe all along, forgetting to care for herself.
As if desperate to stay on track but slowly losing due to my heart cracking wide, she shook her head, eyes closed. “That’s not true. You are who matters. That’s why I need you to hear that everything needs to be left as is?—”
Her preparations for her death infuriated me, I shouted, “No!” Then I attempted to reign in my rage, growling, “You should get to go home.”
Her tired eyes bored into mine. “I am. With you.”
“No!” I lost it, roaring. “Where our first home was! You should rest next to Grandpa!”
Fucking dancing stars dripped down her face as she begged for reason. “My baby boy, someone could trace where my body came from and find you.” Her bruised hands clutched her thinning chest. “Please. I’ll be buried here. Near you. Where I want to be.”
Ready to explode, again, all over this unfair life, I gripped my hair and pulled. “I don’t want to be here! I don’t want to be placed in a foster home!”
Shaking hands covered her face as if a newfound shame was killing her more than the cancer. She begged any miracle willing to hear her. “Oh God, please help me. Please, God. Give me another option.”
We didn’t have one. We had cut all ties. And I was a threat to all who once knew me.
There was nowhere else for fifteen-year-old Johnny Watts to go but into the system with strangers who knew no better. Noma had already notified child services of our depressing circumstances, so they were searching for ‘placement’. And to think I had, innocently, been worried about high school, clueless to how life as I knew it was ending.
That night we fought, it was our last. After I stomped up the stairs to my loft and flung my bratty body into bed, soft footsteps came to join me. Noma stood at the edge of the bed. “Can I tuck you in, baby boy?”
If life would’ve permitted, I think I wanted her to tuck me in until I was deep into my forties. If not longer.
Still not speaking, I got out of the bed so she could, as she’d done so many times, fold back the blanket so I could crawl underneath. Once on my back, pillow cradling my head, I watched her beautiful smile approach, laying the blanket over me. Then, with straight fingers, she pushed my blanket and sheet along and under my body so I could fall asleep, tucked and loved.
Matching my silence, she pushed hair from my forehead and kissed it.
I love you, Noma.
Noma had been correct about so many things. Including no time left.
All I had was one person in my life. That was it. Now? She was being taken away. It’s so hard to explain how that felt. Imagine being put into a dark box, not even big enough for you to stand upright, and the one person you had was at the door, offering the only light you would ever see again. Then imagine her crying as she was forced to stay outside that box and start closing that door… Imagine watching that light getting smaller and smaller, knowing there was not one thing or person that could stop how alone you would be for the rest of your very existence.
That is what it was like to watch Noma die.
The pain medications she was on didn’t help. Sometimes her mind slipped and her thoughts were elusive at best. “Your grandfather wishes he could be your grandfather.”
What?
Each moment that passed was one step closer to a maddening infinity of solitude.
Hallucinations sometimes were at a peak. “Is he at the window?”
Sitting in a chair next to the hospital bed that had been delivered for Noma, a hospice nurse viewed me with pity, shaking her head. There was no one at Noma’s bedroom window. Besides the nurse, she and I were, tragically all alone.
More days passed as this woman fought on, sometimes so present it was like having her younger self with me. “Baby boy, I said, go eat some dinner. Don’t test me.”
Relieved at her tone that was so in control, I smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
But, as they say, control is nothing other than a façade. An illusion. A painful hope to cling to. I held tight while Death’s gift held me tight, forcing it so I could sense her energy fading from a body that was once so strong for its petite size.
Death’s gift was beyond cruel. I didn’t need the hospice nurse to tell me Noma was taking her last breaths. Feeling like I was dying, too, I stood next to her bed and held her hand while listening to her final bit of wisdom.
