The Dying Time

Late September and early October is always a difficult time for me. I'm from North Georgia originally, and the cooler temperatures there, added to the vibrant colors as nature flashes its last hurrah before its seasonal death, always send me into a roller coaster ride of emotions. I'm not in Georgia now, I'm in southern California where the patterns are different, but the habits of a lifetime are very difficult to change.

My mother died in the Fall, right after her birthday, and her last hurrah began in the Spring that year and was over in what seemed an instant. Only six months to finish a lifetime that had always been a struggle, and her death was no different.

She had lung cancer which meted and developed into bone lesions in her thigh, spine and skull, and by the time she came to live with me for her final three months the lesion in her skull rendered her incapable of recognizing family members a lot of the time. By the time she reached the end I thought I would be grateful for the end of her suffering, no more head splitting headache or screaming confusion, but I just missed her, still miss her. Toward the end I realized how much I love her, yes, still love her. I will not put a past tense on that word.

When I began writing flash stories for a writer's group and was given the word "purple" as my subject word, I realized that maybe this story could be a sort of quick final tribute, in a fashion, to her bright spirit and unorthodox soul. It's quick, but catches something that she had told me once, that I was too young and stupid to understand at the time, but at almost sixty, I understand it now.

And the subject word was: PURPLE.

(From "Baker's Dozen," my growing flash short story collection)

And sometimes we reach the front of the line. The topic was PASSAGE.

Purple

by Mari Sloan

Copyright 2000

They were all so worried. Through the fog created by the drugs and her body’s natural chemical defenses she saw their faces appear, as if through a thick gray cloud, for brief, immeasurable moments. She knew time played tricks on her. Time and whatever they pumped into her system to ensure she felt no pain. Faces appeared and faces left; voices resonated words trailing each other like steps on a stairway. As each disappeared, the mist took their place. She could not see further than the side of her hospital cot.

Their faces were so sad. Her daughter cried, tears streaking her cheeks and small mewing noises erupting from her throat. She reached to touch her but nothing moved. Poor Elissa. She could never actually cry. She always tried to hold it in. At forty-three she still carried that stiff upper lip legacy her Father taught her so young. How little that mattered now.

“When I am old I will wear purple.” She remembered the horror on Lissa’s face when she told her that. They were shopping for something to wear to a funeral, of all things.

“But Mom, you can’t wear purple. People would laugh at us.” It matters so little what we wear. It matters that we satisfy our dreams, sweet girl. How she wished she could say that and erase those tears from her child’s face. Poor little Goose. She was going to miss her so much. This death thing was so inconveniently timed. There was so much that her baby still needed to learn from her before she went away. Like how to laugh, for instance. The young are so damn serious. And Lissa wasn’t all that young anymore.

There. It happened again. Her thought left her before she replaced it with another. She could barely see the faces now. Colors filled her world like sparklers on the Fourth of July. She struggled to breathe, but it didn’t really matter. She no longer felt her body. She decided to hold her breath, like she used to when she teased her Mother. It was odd. She’d never felt excitement before without feeling all the bodily cues. None of this happened now; no racing breath, no pounding heart, instead her mind careened wildly into the abyss, her mind and her soul.

Whatever the rites of passage for the new place that she approached, she realized she could never have prepared for them. Like life itself, you just arrived, one thread in the fabric of the Universe. And her color would be her own, a vibrant magenta, a beautiful shiny purple woven in with the rest of eternity to be. And it was now.