How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  After we parked, Mom got out, walked over to the passenger side, and helped Grandma get out of the car. Wrapping their arms around each other, mother and daughter rose, then slowly walked into the café. Mom whispered something. I followed behind with my aunt Celia, scrolling through pictures of my studio apartment in Jersey City for her.

  “See?” Mom said, allowing her mother to lean into her weight. “It’s easier to walk like this, isn’t it? This is how it would be with a cane.” I couldn’t hear if my grandmother answered but it sounded like another installment in a conversation the two of them had been having for months. Mom was flying to Memphis from Atlanta most weekends now to visit her mother. She was thinking about moving there full-time. Whenever the topic came up, I changed the subject or got quiet until she changed it. For most of the afternoon, my grandmother and I had barely spoken beyond the initial hellos and hugs. We talked through my mother and my aunt, filtering our conversation between them, politely pretending not to notice how consistently the two of us avoided making eye contact.

  It was a bright spring afternoon. Tulips lined the outdoor café, drooping their heads. My mother ordered mimosas for everyone, even though my grandmother rarely if ever drank.

  Was soul music playing at the café that day? I can’t remember. I only remember the insistence of my mother’s smile and laughter, and how I felt the urge to resist it—to prove a point and send a dark cloud over the day. But then, I couldn’t do it.

  Maybe she was the music I’m trying to recall now. My mother’s mood caught us like a Bill Withers chorus. My grandmother burped, looking at her mimosa as if betrayed. Then she giggled, decades falling from her face for a moment. Mom and my aunt started laughing too. I smirked, at first just trying to be a good sport. But then the laughter settled into an irresistible rhythm. I bumped my shoulder into Aunt Celia, our heads leaning against each other’s for a moment. How many mimosas had we had? We all laughed louder.

  Even now, I can hear it. I can hear the music ringing out. I can see my mother at the head of the table: the only one who could bring us all together, the only one who could tune us into any semblance of harmony. The sweetness was ours that day and, for once, no one at the table denied it.

  18MAY 7, 2011

  JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

  The night before Mother’s Day, I was in bed watching a TV show on my laptop, willfully avoiding the lesson plans I needed to finish. On my screen, a businessman stood in the middle of a barren field, begging the stranger standing behind him with a pistol not to pull the trigger. The shot rang out. The man fell to his knees.

  My phone started to ring.

  My uncle Albert was calling from Memphis. Seeing his name on the phone’s screen brought a burst of irritation. What now? I thought. I don’t have time for this. My uncle and I usually spoke once or twice a year, if that, mostly birthdays and holidays. He probably wanted to remind me about Mother’s Day and to call all the women in my family like a good son, a good nephew, a good grandson. Mom was in Memphis, celebrating with my grandmother. I watched my uncle’s name flash on the phone’s screen, arguing with him in my head. I didn’t need a reminder to call my own mother on Mother’s Day. I would call everyone in the morning when I woke up.

  His name flickered again and then went dim. I turned the phone facedown. It was none of his business that I hadn’t planned far enough ahead to mail Mom a gift or card this year. It was my first year working full-time, trying to make good on undergrad and grad school. I was busy; she understood.

  I hit Play on my laptop. The businessman was still on his knees, looking up at the bright blue sky as if noticing a halo above his head, then he fell face first into the mud. My phone rang again; Uncle Albert again.

  I realized people don’t call that late at night to just nag. I answered.

  “Saeed,” my uncle said, his voice calm but firm, as if he’d heard the silent argument we’d just had. “Your mother is in the emergency room. After dinner tonight, she had trouble breathing and went to the hospital. I’ll call you back as soon as I know more.”

  I said, “Okay,” then waited for more words to come. But they didn’t. My uncle hesitated for a moment, perhaps waiting for me to say something else, to overwhelm him with frantic questions. He took a breath then hung up.

  The businessman was still facedown in the mud. His killer was off screen. It felt like someone was standing in the corner of my apartment now, a silent judge taking note of my every move and expression. I slid out of bed, careful not to knock over the glass of cheap red wine on the floor, and walked to my altar. That corner, I decided. The person I couldn’t see must be standing in that corner. Turning back to face the altar, I lit the candles and started chanting, surprised to hear words actually leaving my mouth.

  When she was worried, my mother could chant for hours without stopping. For weeks at a time, she would wake up early and chant for two, even three hours before getting dressed for work. And when she got home at the end of the day, she would sit right back in front of her altar and start chanting all over again. Eviction notices on the kitchen counter, a car that had broken down the day before, prescriptions for heart medication that needed to be refilled despite an overdrawn checking account, a gay son living on his own hundreds of miles away. She chanted until the Sanskrit words became abstract sounds, until the sound itself became unnoticeable. Like crickets chirping outside your window on a spring evening, the sound of my mother’s prayers just became the night itself.

  I looked at my watch. Less than five minutes had passed. I couldn’t chant for hours; I wasn’t like my mother. My mind would start to drift, slipping into unexpected memories and anxieties, blurring the past, present, and unreal until I needed to stop and check the time. When I was a teenager, kneeling or sitting cross-legged in front of the altar for even thirty minutes would give me cramps. Mom would swat my thigh when I prayed with her, my legs sprawled out on the carpet like I was a life-size rag doll. She could always tell when I was starting to drift off.

  Blowing out the candles, closing the altar’s wooden doors, I thought about the night she drove herself to the ER in Lewisville, just hours before driving that U-Haul truck for nearly twelve hours nonstop to Atlanta. My family didn’t understand the kind of woman my mother had become. She wasn’t like them, or me. She was stronger.

  I got back in bed, hit Rewind, and watched the businessman get shot all over again. Nothing had changed. It comforted me to see him fall to the ground exactly like he’d fallen the first time. He was locked in a story and it went on according to plan. My mother and I were in a story too, I remember thinking. This night would, in the end, just be one Sanskrit word uttered in a very long prayer. I slept well that night, but I didn’t dream.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, my uncle called before my alarm clock went off. I knocked over the empty wineglass when my feet hit the floor and, I swear, by the time I reached down to pick it up I was on an airplane flying toward Memphis.

  “Saeed, your mother is in a coma,” he had said. “You need to find a way to get here.” She had gone into cardiac arrest just after the ambulance arrived at the hospital. More than twenty minutes passed before doctors were able to get her heart back into a regular pattern. Time held her brain hostage for each of those minutes. Her body went into a coma in reaction to the trauma.

  I can’t remember my uncle speaking these words, though surely he must have been the first person to explain what had happened. I didn’t know any of this and then it was all I knew. When the flight attendant asked me to turn off my phone, I was tempted to ask her to speak louder, to shout over the other sentence—couldn’t she hear it?—“Saeed, your mother is in a coma.”

  A man in his thirties sat next to me on the flight. When he slid past me, I smelled sandalwood, and I hated myself for noticing. How can you be thinking that at a time like this? a voice shouted in my head. Even the most banal ideas and gestures seemed to turn against me, transformed by the idea that there was a certain way
to “be” in a crisis. It was like I was learning how to be a man again—and already failing. The good son, the good nephew, the good grandson. If only someone would give me the script so I could perform my role accordingly. Without it, I found myself stunned into silence, fearful that my next word, thought, or action would be the last coin dropped onto the scale, tipping me toward judgment. The punishment, I assumed, would be my mother’s worsening condition.

  The passenger leaned toward me at one point, holding out his phone, swiping through pictures from a recent ski trip. I ordered a Bloody Mary, and then I ordered another Bloody Mary. Did he make a joke about also needing a stiff drink on Mother’s Day? What kind of man… Mother’s Day. I hadn’t thought about it until just then. He asked what I had planned for my trip in Memphis and I said that my mother was sick and I was going to check on her. He nodded, eyes lowered, then changed the subject: Did I have a boyfriend, Saeed, your mother is in a coma, where in town would I be staying, Saeed, your mother is in a coma.

  Walking off the plane and down the Jetway toward the gate, I thought about how Mom and I had been flying in and out of this airport since my very first flight. Back when families could still meet arriving passengers at the gate, my grandmother would meet us there amid the crowd. “I could hear you just laughing and talking the whole way,” she would say, teasing us. “I just said, ‘Yep, Carol and Saeed.’ My baby and her baby, as loud as can be.” And we’d hug and laugh again. Her accent always pooled a little extra honey into the vowels of our names.

  Alone this time, I walked through the memory of that laughter. My uncle and his wife picked me up outside baggage claim. Loading my suitcase into the back of their SUV, I realized that I’d only brought a backpack and a small weekend suitcase. I couldn’t even remember what I’d packed that morning. Sliding into the backseat, I smiled, even joked, making small talk. My aunt told me she liked my sunglasses. When my uncle said that we should probably go directly to the hospital, I inhaled and nodded.

  * * *

  THE HALLWAYS IN the hospital hummed with silence, occasionally shot through with the sound of violent coughing from a patient in one of the dark rooms we passed. When we reached the ICU, my legs started to stiffen and shudder. A nurse at the station nodded at my uncle and smiled at me. The look of someone who knows the next sentence of your story before you do. My aunt decided to wait in the hallway. And then my uncle put his hand on my shoulder, guiding me toward one of the rooms. The tenderness of his touch set off a serpentine chill through my body. If he was being this gentle, it was because he knew I needed to be prepared for what I was about to see.

  We stepped into the hushed room together, but as I approached the bed, I felt that I was on my own. I cannot tell you who I thought I saw sleeping there, surrounded by machines, wires and tubes snaking in and out of her body. Poor woman, lonely stranger. Where is her family? Is there someone we can call?

  I looked at my uncle and he nodded, as if understanding the question in my eyes. We were the ones who had been called. We stood close enough for my hands to rest on the bed’s rails. I hesitated to touch her. My uncle started speaking to her as I stared. With two fingers, he smoothed a few strands of hair away from her face.

  And, like a grim miracle, there she was. My mother’s face. My mother’s hair. Under her eyes, dark circles: a gift from my grandmother to my mother to me.

  I think I tried to talk to my mother then. You know the voice, the way family members speak from the hospital bedside of loved ones. That tone. I tried it, even as I hated it. The pity and desperation, a sickly sweetness clinging to my words, slowing them down, putting pauses in my sentences where I did not mean to be silent. I spoke about my flight, about my uncle picking me up at the airport, about my twelfth graders reading Toni Morrison this unit. I even talked about the weather. Nothing.

  “I’m here, Mama. I’m right here,” I said, at a loss.

  I thought back to the night I visited her in the ER in Lewisville, when she had congestive heart failure. “I can’t go back to sleep,” she had whispered to the nurse as I stood nearby. “I’m afraid that if I go to sleep I won’t wake back up.”

  As this memory washed over me, I looked up and saw my mother’s eyelids start to flutter. I thought she was waking up, as if all she had needed was for her son to stand at her bedside and say “Mama.” I thought that maybe we would be okay. Maybe she would need to stay in Memphis for a few weeks to recover, even months. Maybe I could fly back on the weekends to check on her. I’m sure my boss would understand. It would be exhausting, all the back and forth, but we’d figure it out. Maybe the two of us were, in fact, as special as I hadn’t before dared to believe.

  The machines surrounding us lit up, beeping and flashing. Doctors and nurses rushed into the room as my mother’s head started shaking, her whole body writhing as spit foamed at her mouth.

  I hadn’t even known it was possible for someone in a coma to have a seizure. I stood stunned. I froze, in everyone’s way, until my uncle all but picked me up and carried me out of the room. Back in the hallway, I tried to catch my breath as I looked back over my shoulder. My mouth hung open in shock. I tried to walk away but I had no legs, there was no floor. I started to collapse just as my uncle rushed to catch me.

  He guided me to a chair and I sat, waiting for the rest of my body to find me. A doctor walked over and explained what had just happened, but I couldn’t really hear him. A few minutes later, my uncle and I went back to check on her. The doctors and nurses were gone. She was just a sleeping woman again.

  We spoke to her, and I started chanting softly. Or maybe I was just thinking about chanting. I can’t remember. Just a few moments later, my mother had another seizure. Doctors and nurses rushed back into the room and this time I ran out. When my uncle found me, I’m not sure who or what he saw, but he guided me down that hallway, past room after room.

  Back in his SUV, a city blurred on the other side of the window. I knew my uncle and aunt were talking, but I couldn’t make out the words except when she said, “He’s just going to need some time, Albert.” Sitting in the backseat, I could feel it begin: the outlines of my silhouette beginning to crumble and come apart, the color of my skin and then the flesh itself pooling out like ink dropped into clear water, all swirls and eddies. I was turning into fog. And in me, what had already been difficult—distinguishing between memory and present moment, between thought and action—became practically impossible. I could’ve been anywhere; I could’ve been anything.

  * * *

  I SAT AT the table in my grandmother’s kitchen. When I was a little boy, sometimes I would sit at this perfect dark wooden circle with her and my grandfather for dinner. There used to be a lamp hanging directly over the table and it would start to swing a bit whenever Memphis experienced tremors from the nearby fault line in Arkansas. The lamp would swing back and forth, pushing and pulling our shadows as we ate our food without much conversation. No one bothered to explain why every once in a while, for just a few seconds, the earth would tremble and that lamp would sway. I would look at my grandparents, unable to decipher their silence, and go back to my other pressing concern: if I didn’t eat all my food, I would have to sit alone at that table until told otherwise. And so, the three of us would just keep eating. The lamp always exhausted itself.

  I had sat at this same table to write a poem the last Christmas my mother and I had visited Memphis together. I would write a line, stop, and write the line over again, changing a word or moving a comma. I loved poetry then, not so much because of language and images but because I enjoyed the control. It was snowing outside the kitchen window. My mother and grandmother were sitting in the living room, and I could catch occasional snippets of their conversation.

  “Are you still crying about that dog?” my grandmother asked at one point. I thought I could detect a teasing laugh in her throat, her Memphis accent turning “dog” into “dawg.”

  The summer before, Kingsley had died, and Mom had taken it especially har
d. I hadn’t heard my mother crying, but I got up and stood in the kitchen’s doorway. Sitting on the couch, Mom wept quietly, her head bent forward as she looked at her hands.

  “I miss him,” she said softly, in a sudden childlike voice.

  Grandma was staring out the window. She was in her favorite chair, her right leg bouncing just a bit, the way it always did when she was thinking but not going to say what she was thinking.

  After my grandfather died, sometimes I’d see her sitting on the couch, bouncing her leg for a few minutes before she’d get up and turn on some music—Bill Withers’s “Use Me” and Al Green’s “Tired of Being Alone” are the songs I remember her playing the most. The opening chords would start and she’d slowly back away from the cassette player, swaying as she gained momentum, and then she was off. She’d dance from room to room, singing along and swaying, the saddest smiling woman I had ever seen.

  “Grandma, it wasn’t that long ago,” I said, standing at the edge of the kitchen. She had been letting the silence grow. “We both still miss him,” I said.

  Mom had called me right after Kingsley had died, late at night, crying. “I’m holding him right now,” she said on the phone. “I picked Kingsley up, brought him into bed with me, and just held him until he stopped breathing.”

  She’d felt so far away. Maybe, I wondered, if we hadn’t been far away from each other that night, I would be as sad as she was about Kingsley dying.

  Watching my grandmother continue to bounce her leg and my mother wiping her face, I didn’t know what more to say. I decided to step away that day. I didn’t know how to explain these two women to each other. They were their own business. I retreated back to the kitchen table and the poem and the snow falling outside the window.