Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

she had. And I thought, all these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, then you’ll find yourself, in life. It’s not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you’re comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you’re dying, Mother is dying, and it’s just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you’ve had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn’t it, you’d break your heart wanting back there.
    When they let me in to see her she was bluish-gray in the face and her eyes were not all-the-way closed, but they had rolled up, the slit that was open showed the whites. She always looked terrible with her teeth out, anyway, wouldn’t let us see her. Cam teased her vanity. They were out now. So all the time, I thought, all the time even when she was young it was in her that she was going to look like this.
    They didn’t hold out hope. Haro came and took a look at her and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Val, you’ll have to be prepared.” He meant well but I couldn’t talk to him. It wasn’t his mother and he couldn’t remember anything. That wasn’t his fault but I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to listen to him telling me I better be prepared. We went and ate something in the hospital cafeteria.
    “You better phone Cam,” Haro said.
    “Why?”
    “He’ll want to know.”
    “Why do you think he’ll want to know? He left her alone last night and he didn’t know enough to get an ambulance when he came in and found her this morning.”
    “Just the same. He has a right. Maybe you ought to tell him to get over here.”
    “He is probably busy this moment preparing to give her a hippie funeral.”
    But Haro persuaded me as he always can and I went and phoned. No answer. I felt better because I had phoned, and justified in what I had said because of Cam not being in. I went back and waited, by myself.
    About seven o’clock that night Cam turned up. He was not alone. He had brought along a tribe of co-priests, I suppose they were, from that house. They all wore the same kind of outfit he did, the brown sacking nightgown and the chains and crosses and holy hardware, they all had long hair, they were all a good many years younger than Cam, except for one old man, really old, with a curly gray beard and bare feet—in March, bare feet—and no teeth. I swear this old man didn’t have a clue what was going on. I think they picked him up down by the Salvation Army and put that outfit on him because they needed an old man for a kind of mascot, or extra holiness, or something.
    Cam said, “This is my sister Valerie. This is Brother Michael. This is Brother John, this is Brother Louis.” Etc., etc.
    “They haven’t said anything to give me hope, Cam. She is dying.”
    “We hope not,” said Cam with his secret smile. “We spent the day working for her.”
    “Do you mean praying?” I said.
    “Work is a better word to describe it than praying, if you don’t understand what it is.”
    Well of course, I never understand.
    “Real praying is work, believe me,” says Cam and they all smile at me, his way. They can’t keep still, like children who have to go to the bathroom they’re weaving and jiggling and doing little steps.
    “Now where’s her room?” says Cam in a practical tone of voice.
    I thought of Mother dying and through that slit between her lids—who knows, maybe she can see from time to time—seeing this crowd of dervishes celebrating around her bed. Mother who lost her religion when she was thirteen and went to the Unitarian Church and quit when they had the split about crossing God out of the hymns (she was for it), Mother having to spend her last conscious minutes wondering what had happened, if she was transported back in history to where loonies cavorted around in their crazy ceremonies, trying to sort her last reasonable thoughts out in the middle of their business.
    Thank God the nurse said no. The intern was brought and he said no. Cam didn’t insist, he smiled and nodded at them as if they were granting permission and then he brought the