My dad bursts into tears.
The palliative care doctor gives the okay, and we take off the mask.
Mom takes a breath without it, and right away the monitors start binging and bonging, complaining noisily about her oxygen levels, but one of the nurses reaches up and mutes them. “Mountain Dew…please?” she asks, and we dispatch Ryan to go get it. Which is when I get a text from Tyler that he’s landed and he’s going to grab a cab as fast as he can.
Mom reaches for me and Dad and Aiden. “Want…to pray…”
“We can call for the hospital chaplain,” I start but she shakes her head. I notice with some dismay that there’s already a certain kind of paleness blooming around her lips and eyes.
“Don’t want chaplain,” she pants. “Want…family prayer.”
Dad, Aiden and I share a look of mutual panic.
“Babe, Tyler will be here very soon,” my dad pleads. “He can pray for you.”
“No,” she insists. “Now.” Her eyes dart to mine and there’s an urgency to them that can’t be denied—not now.
“We can pray until Tyler gets here,” I assure her. “Um. If I can remember how.”
Aiden laughs awkwardly, but I’m not actually kidding. My last successful prayer was an I hate you directed up at my bedroom ceiling, and all the times I’ve tried to pray since have slid sideways into wordlessness, a flat wall of failure. And, to be brutally, grossly honest, I almost don’t want to do it. Despite the fact that it’s her wish, despite my slowly shifting relationship with God, there’s a part of me that still balks. There’s a part of me that still thinks, I’ll do anything for my mom, but I’ll be damned before I pray.
Except, when I open my mouth, words do come out. They come out even though I’m surly, even though I’m panicked. They’re not my words, they’re thousands of years old, and at first I feel stupid, because I’ve always seen it as a sort of filler prayer, the kind you mutter while your thoughts wander away to sports and girls. But as I pray it now, each and every word feels painfully fitted to this moment, a bespoke chant of motherhood and compassion.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
To my shock, other voices are praying with me at the end. My father and Aiden and even Ryan, hovering at the foot of the bed with his elixir of Mountain Dew.
“Perfect,” Mom says breathlessly. “Again, please?”
She doesn’t have enough air to pray it along with us, but she mouths the familiar words as we go, holding my hand tightly, and something starts to break open inside of me, something aside from the poignant pre-grief permeating the room.
I’d always thought real prayer, real religious expression, had to be unique. Individualistic. New and tailored for the person expressing it because otherwise what’s the point?
But for the first time, I feel the power of praying words alongside someone else, the power of praying words so familiar and ancient they come from some hitherto unknown part of my mind. The part of my mind that isn’t consumed with accounting and finance, the part that isn’t even rational or entirely civilized. It’s a part of me so deep, so elemental, I can’t even name it. But it responds to the old words like trees to wind, rustling awake, stretching roots deep, deep down. The words don’t care about my feelings, about my petty sulks and mortal frustrations. The words are there anyway, just as the humanness inside me is there anyway, and for one clear, shimmering moment, I understand.
I understand how you can convict God of terrible crimes and then go to evening prayer.
I understand that hate was never, ever the opposite of belief.
I understand that belief isn’t a coat to be put on and worn in all kinds of weather, even the blistering sun.
Belief is this. Praying when you don’t feel like it, when you don’t know who or what is listening; it’s doing the actions with the trust that something about it matters. That something about it makes you more human, a better human, a human able to love and trust and hope in a world where those things are hard.
That is belief. That is the point of prayer. Not logging a wish list inside a cosmic ledger, not bartering for transactional services. You do it for the change it works on you and on those around you; the point of it is…itself. Nothing more and nothing less.
We pray together, mumbling, muttering, a chorus of men praying for a woman, to a woman, about a woman. A chorus of men praying for prayers. And with each and every turn of the words, something inside me loosens and loosens. A screw unscrewing itself and falling dead to the ground, leaving nothing but a buzzing, tingling awareness in its stead.
Mom pumps my hand as we finish another prayer, and I look down at her, expecting she’ll say enough prayer, it’s Mountain Dew time, but then the door whooshes open and I’m looking up because I’m sure it’s Tyler, but it’s not Tyler.
It’s Zenny.
Zenny in her jumper, Zenny with her large dark eyes and soft loving mouth and her nose ring winking cheekily in the sunlight.
It’s Zenny, here, and I forget how to breathe.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” she says. But she doesn’t get to what she does mean to do because my mom is waving for her to come up to the bed, waving with a trembling hand and a heaving chest. The Bell men part to let her through, and Mom gestures at Zenny to lean in close, which Zenny does.
Whatever she says, she says in a stertorous whisper that I can’t make out from my position on the other side of the bed. Zenny says something back, low and musical, and my mother nods, smiles, puts a dry, gray hand to Zenny’s cheek. Another hoarse murmur, something that makes Zenny’s mouth pinch and crumple and tremble, and I watch as tears spill out of her eyes and she and my mom pull each other into a hug.
And that I can see this, just this once, the woman I love hugging my mother like she’s family—I’m speechless with it. It’s a gift I never expected to have. It’s a miracle.
Thank you.
The words flutter out, easily and without labor, flying up to the ceiling. That I would be thanking God for anything at my mother’s deathbed would have struck me as impossible a mere hour ago, but somehow it’s true and right that it’s happening now. That there would be small moments of joy tucked into this hulking, bashing loss.
Zenny straightens up, tucking some of my mom’s hair behind her ear, and for a minute I think she’s going to go, and I can’t let her. It’s selfish and horrible and a garbage thing to do, to ask her to stay here and witness this. To stay and be strong for me because I can’t be strong for myself.
I don’t care. It makes me awful but I can’t be otherwise right now. I need her, and she can leave me all she wants later, but for now—for now I need her.
I reach out for my little nun, and she doesn’t hesitate, coming to my side of the bed and sliding her arms around my waist like she belongs there, which she does. I bury my face in her hair, holding onto her like a man holds on to the edge of a cliff. And just once—it’s terrible I know, clingy and entitled and unwanted—I kiss the top of her head, letting my lips feel the ticklish brush of her curls, letting myself have that one small comfort.
When I look back to my mother, she’s looking up at Zenny and me holding each other close. My mother lays her head back and smiles, as if this were more than she could have asked for, as if her work as a mother is done. And then she wheeze-asks for the Mountain Dew, and at long last, she gets to drink it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Chapter Thirty-One
I’ll spare you the gritty details of what comes next. Death, even surrounded by family, even with prayer and morphine working in tandem, is hard. There’s no do-overs, there’s no rehearsals.
Tyler arrives in more than enough time to have a moment with Mom. He does a better job of leading u
s through prayers than I did, and I gratefully relinquish the role to him, so relieved to have at least one thing off my shoulders.
At one point, Zenny whispers to me that this is like birth in a way, and she shows us Bell men how to lovingly doula Carolyn Bell through a different kind of labor. We rub her hands and feet, we stroke her hair. We pray and talk constantly, even when her eyes start drifting closed and her breathing shudders into a series of jagged moans and gasps. We never want her to feel alone, not even for a second.
The sun beams in, and without the constant drone of the ventilator and the incessant pinging of the monitors, we can hear the September wind whipping warmly by, a comforting late-summer sound.
It takes less than three hours, all told.
At the very last, the room lights on fire. It quartzes itself into an infinite glittering moment. It floods with vivid pain and joy and love and grief and I am opened up, I am melted away, and I feel God. For a blinding, breathless, reckless moment, I touch my fingertips to eternity.
And as I do, I also touch my fingertips to Mom in this place. As she is hovering, flashing, brilliant, a soul on her way to wherever bright souls go.
I’m shaking after. Shaking like a leaf and so is Tyler, and he meets my wet eyes with wet eyes of his own and says, “Did you feel it too?”
I nod and then look up at the monitors.
Mom is gone. It’s over and Mom is gone.
No one ever does drink the Shasta soda.
There’s a lot of shuffling around next. They clean up the body and do whatever medical things they need to do to verify her death, then they invite us back in for a last viewing. She looks peaceful now, nothing like the laboring woman earlier, and we look at her for a long time. Dad kisses her hair and her face and her lips for a final time. The rest of us stand around like men in shell shock.
Zenny’s gone and I don’t know when she left, and all of a sudden the strange rapture that came with Mom’s death pops like a pricked balloon, and I’m left flattened.
And yet there’s more to do.
There are the arrangements to make, what funeral home will take her and the remaining hospital business to finish up. There are the phone calls, three or four of them, different organizations asking for pieces of Mom. Her corneas. Her tendons. Her skin and heart valves.
It was her wish to donate as much as possible after her death and of course it’s logical—she doesn’t need any of those parts of her anymore—but it still makes my throat close with anger and tears. It’s like beating back carrion, being swarmed by vultures, and part of me just wants to scream she only just died, can we have a fucking minute before her body is stripped down for parts?
I don’t scream that. I follow her wishes, and try to take some comfort in knowing that there’s still something Carolyn Bell is doing for the world. That there’s another pocket of joy tucked into this day, and it’s that someone’s life will be materially better because my mom was here on this planet.
It’s still not easy.
After the hospital, we go back to Mom and Dad’s house and all of the Bell brothers proceed to get rip-roaringly, staggeringly drunk, sitting around the kitchen table and telling stories. Tomorrow, the funeral director will visit and all the arrangements will be finalized, tomorrow we’ll have to start calling and emailing and responding to condolences.
But tonight we grieve and laugh. Tonight we remember.
Later, as I lay in my childhood room, listening to Aiden and Tyler singing in the kitchen, the hole in my chest slowly stretches out beyond the borders of my body, it fills the entire room. It becomes a dark and massive mirror that beckons me to look inside. And inside I see my mother and sister, I see Zenny. I see God.
For the first time in my life, I look at the inside of myself. The ugly parts, the good parts, the parts in between. The grief both old and new, and the love for Zenny that flashes like a pulsar, a lighthouse for my soul, and the blue, swollen bruise of wanting her and the toothache-sweet feeling of loving her in spite of her leaving me.
For the first time in my life, I look inside myself and I just accept what’s there. I accept what I can’t control and what I can, I accept the parts of Sean Bell that simply are and the parts of Sean Bell that need to change. And the prayer I offer up isn’t one born out of anger or grief or gratitude or some other wild, fevered feeling. It’s simply an invitation for God to come sit at the mirror with me.
God does.
And that night, the warm September wind brings me a storm. A real one, with forcing gusts of wind and silver-black sheets of rain, and lightning fissuring the sky like it’s trying to pry it apart. Thunder rolls through the house, rattling the window, and I get out of bed, I pull on a pair of pajama pants, I go downstairs and out to the backyard.
I stand in the storm for what feels like hours, letting the rain sluice over my bare chest and back, letting it dance over my closed eyelids and against my parted lips. I let it fill up the hole inside me, I let it find every ridge and valley and vault of my body and my heart.
I hope Mom is dancing between the raindrops now, I hope she’s somewhere laughing and dancing with God.
And it comes to me like a clap of thunder that Zenny is under the same rain now, that somewhere this very same lightning-light is touching her face, and I can almost imagine it’s me touching her face. I can almost imagine the rain on my lips is her lips, the drops sliding down to my navel and over my hips are her fingers and her tongue. I can almost imagine she’s here with me now and I can say I’m sorry I wanted you to choose me, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
I can say But have you ever seen yourself? Heard yourself? How could I ever want any different when you are who you are?
But she’s not here.
I’m utterly alone, except for—ironically enough—God.
Chapter Thirty-Two
voice message 11:34 a.m.
Sean—
After I left the hospital yesterday, it was time to begin the short retreat that postulants take before receiving their veil. Which means no outside contact, no technology, nothing but three days of contemplation and prayer. But I couldn’t have you noticing my absence at your mother’s funeral and thinking it was because I didn’t want to be there.
I wish I could be there. I wish I could hold your hand during it. You deserve that, and I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you didn’t. You deserve a girl who will give you everything.
Before your mom died, she told me…well, it doesn’t matter now, I guess. But I wanted you to know that those words are lodged in my heart like shrapnel, just like you are.
Just like you are, Sean.
There’s no sanctuary free of you and the memories you gave me, there’s no part of me that isn’t splintered with you. I still don’t know how to feel about that—angry? Melancholy? Lucky?
Happy?
Blessed?
There was a reason I didn’t answer you when you asked me if I loved you back. And there’s a reason I’m sneaking a phone call and not sneaking out to tell you these things face to face. Because if I told you face to face, you’d see, and you’d know and then—
God, you’d be right and I hate it when you’re right. It’s so funny that I ended it because you can’t give up having control…and now I’m finding I have the same problem. It’s not that I can’t give up God or my sisters or even my vocation, because I know I could still have these things in another life. I’m not so categorical and stubborn that I can’t see that. But I can’t give up control over my life, because if I don’t have that, then what do I have left? If I don’t get what I’ve been working so hard for, hurting for, and sweating for—then what will all those sacrifices have been worth? It would feel cowardly, and I’m no coward.
I started this with you to find out what I’d be missing, and I did find out. It’s you. I’ll be missing you.
I hope my saying that counts for something. Somehow. In the end.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I ignore them. If God Himself couldn’t stop me right now, then I’m certainly not going to let the trees do it.
I’m only here to say goodbye to her, I tell the trees. Calm down.
I glance down at my watch and then at the invitation I’ve got clutched in my hand. Elijah had wordlessly handed it to me during my mom’s funeral, and I don’t know what he wanted me to do with it—or if he simply wanted me to know that Zenny was still going to be a nun, despite le detour de Sean Bell. But I’d known what I needed to do the moment I saw it.
The monastery door is open, and I step inside the wide foyer, following the muffled, hymning sonance down the hall to the small chapel, slowing my steps the closer I get. And the slower I walk, the faster my heart hammers.
I tell my stupid heart to stop. That we’re only here to say goodbye. If Zenny can be brave enough to reveal how she feels in the face of this, then I can be too. I can set her free. And I’ll never recover, sure, because she’s it for me, she’s all a sinner like me gets—my one and only chance flashing like a firefly in the dark, too high up to catch. I’ll spend the rest of my life hurting with wanting her, missing her with swift and fierce aches. I’ll spend the rest of my life jealous of God, no matter what fledgling truces He and I have struck.
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