Who I think of most on Decoration Day

Something I wrote last year:

I own few memories of the man who sired me and who I look so alike that having me in front of her must have so pained my mother in the months after she lost her husband.

My father died the summer he was 32 and I was 4. I recall snapshot moments with and of him. He liked to peep around the bedroom doorway to scare me into that giddy “do-that-again-oh-don’t-do-that-again” glee little children love. Late in his illness, he used a wheelchair. One late spring day, my young cousins and I reveled in riding the chair down my grandma’s sloped lawn.

There’s a photo of our family—me, my mother, my sister—surrounding my father as he lies abed in my grandmother’s back bedroom. A kidney dialysis machine, in 1970 the size and shape of a chest freezer, dominates the left side of the frame. I’m blonde and solemn, as I always am in pictures from my early childhood. My 7-year-old sister smiles, but you see in her eyes that she is scared. My parents--they wear the trance of the terrified, the glued-on grins of a couple coming to know that one of them will die soon.

My mother left us a lot in those days, trekking time and again to Nashville with my father. Vanderbilt Hospital was almost 3 hours away from our rural home, and she had no choice. My sister and I stayed mostly with our paternal grandmother and great grandmother and occasionally with Grandma Callie, though she often accompanied her daughter—my mother-- to Nashville to fetch hamburgers, wash laundry and do the nattering chores that don’t go away even when someone you love is fighting for his life.

One day many years later my mother and I were at Vanderbilt for an appointment. As we paused on a pedestrian bridge, Mom started to sob. She’d spotted the boarding house she and my father stayed in when they got the call that a kidney donor had been found. But the family of the man, injured in a car crash, was too pole-axed with shock from the sudden loss of their loved one to bequeath his body parts.  Who can blame them? I don’t think my mother did. But oh the taste of regret and despair that must have risen in her throat when she was told the would-be donor would go into the ground with the kidney that could have given her husband more years to watch his children grow and to see her into her 30s.

My mother came of age quick. A high-school dropout, she ran the dialysis machine that kept my father alive. In those days, that would have been like grasping quantum physics. Except getting higher science doesn’t carry the weight of knowing that one middling mistake and you’d be culpable in the death of the father of your children. Such will season you to stomach and stand what seems unbearable. So thus did Norma Louise become an old woman at 26.