Out Loud

By Sofiya Benedict. 

For Stefan, who is always with me, in sorrow and in joy.

I had to move when the whites of my mother's eyes became the color of Antonovka apples. First came the initial encounter with a hospital room. Then I began to see lifeless walls and beds with someone perpetually groaning in the corner, tables with glasses of water on the chipboard, and stacks of pills. Mom smiled, hiding the catheter under the sleeve of her hospital robe. We agreed that I would live alone for a month or two until she was discharged. I was twenty years old at the time, and I was amused by this game of "real" adulthood. I smoked on the balcony, ate nothing but bananas and scrambled eggs, walked around my apartment, immersed in thoughts, read in the bathtub, and endlessly hosted my friends. At night I thought about my new life: my parents were finally divorced, and my mother and I had created such a beautiful home of our own. It seemed to have taken us an eternity to choose all that floral wallpaper, Viennese chairs, carved door handles, and muffled lampshades for the chandeliers.

At the beginning of December, she was released and my brother and I wanted to celebrate, so we bought cider and her favorite marmalade, the one in the shape of colorful orange and lemon slices. No one ever touched the candy, and my mom kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry, and she couldn't stop.

I think I stopped listening after "at stage three, they are giving four months”. I wanted to go as far away as I could and not listen. The air shrank, and I opened and closed my mouth senselessly, feeling my anger build. The apartment also deflated like a balloon, leaving only one couch where the three of us were sat, avoiding each others eyes. It annoyed me, I wanted to get up, move, move around, do something, and not just stare at the floor. I got up and walked away from the silence.

In April came acceptance and the crush I sorely desired. It covered me with a lifeline. For a short moment in time, I could hide the hateful thoughts deep inside and keep them buried there, avoid looking at them, hide them from others. Instead of gnashing teeth came crumpled theatre tickets in my pockets, pencil drawn portraits, fingers touching the palm, word games, and movies we’ve never finished watching. One night, I gathered my courage and whispered to him: my mother is dying. He was silent for a long time, then answered: I'm sorry, let's not talk about this anymore. We broke up three days after the funeral.

I remember the course of the disease in fragments, in flashes and moments. I am lying on my mother's lap, telling her how my day has been. Her temperature rises to thirty-nine and five. I call an ambulance. And then, for the first time, I feel real fear, and it never leaves me, it becomes my shadow. I suffocate with fear, but quietly, so that no-one notices. I panic a little. I shake a little. I silently ask for help. I pretend that everything is fine. I listen, if she doesn't exhale longer than usual, I freeze: this is it, it's over. But the noisy air comes out of her lungs, and she moves. Water evaporates from her skin in droplets. My mother is hot and thrashing around on the bed. And the ambulance has been on it’s way for an hour. And I wait, wait, wait.

I filled my life with a huge amount of events, got a job in the theatre, and accepted all invitations to go to a museum, to the movies, to a concert, or just for a beer. My mother really wanted to see the sea again, so her and my father flew to Bulgaria. We often called each other and it became easier that way. The problem kind of drifted away. She would spend hours on the video call telling me how good she felt: it almost doesn’t hurt at all, the peaches are ripe, the sea air is so warm, and I even picked up the paints again.

And then my father called and told me that her legs had failed. I often think about that, how it feels to wake up and realise that your legs are no longer under your control, that your body no longer responds to your commands. Trying to imagine what that moment feels like. Is it like when you have slept in an uncomfortable position for a long time and your arms go completely numb?

They came back and went to live in the country, forgetting about the divorce. I never had enough time to visit them. Rather, though, I was making sure I didn't have a spare minute myself. The midterm exams began, and the excuse became legitimate.

Before the last exam, my father informed me that my mother was in intensive care, she had been injected with morphine to relieve the pain, but her body did not accept it and began to actively reject it. I never made it to the institute, and when I went into the hospital room, she was lying there in a delusion, she was throwing up a lot, and the nurses came running in and out without telling me anything coherent.

The next day it was like she was herself again. However, she could no longer eat properly and slept for several hours at a time. My father bought a wheelchair. She was happy and laughed a lot when I came over and pretended to be Professor Xavier in front of her, deliberately bumping into things. I would make up stories for her, and then she would eat something and fall asleep better. From that moment on, everything happened very quickly.

What pissed me off most of all was that the movies deceived me. All that was going on then wasn't a slowly fading human and dignified relatives around the bed, and it wasn't light sadness and melancholy. It was anger. I felt constantly angry at the unjust world, at the people around me asking inappropriate questions, and at the sympathetic faces reveling in their sympathy. I was angry at the tears I couldn't always control, and at my mother for leaving me with it all.

The flow of disease was the same, and I slowly got used to her thinning body, her yellow skin, and her cracked, bluish lips. And one day, a visiting nurse asked me to help with a bandage. And I saw that half of her back was already a corpse, bits of dead tissue and flies swooping down as if they'd been served a royal dinner. I tried not to cry so as not to scare my mother. Except for the smell. It was so disturbing. It followed me everywhere, days, weeks, months later. I walked through the city and smelled the nauseating, sweet smell, and I could see flies crawling over the putrid aroma. Fighting with each other to see who would be the first to touch the black dead flesh framed by the bloody outline with their furry paws.

There were no last words, no advice, no admonitions, and no declarations of love. Two weeks before the end, she stopped recognising me and didn't understand that I was visiting and being there for her. Her eyes were filled with smoke that I couldn't get through. It seemed so pointless to me, just to sit and watch and talk, pretending she understands. I used to talk to trees as a child, but then it seemed to me that in the rustle of the leaves, in the noise of the wind, there was a secret language known only to me. My mother did not speak to me.

But what pissed me off the most was that I began to memorise her like that. My memories were not of the twenty years she'd been around, but of the way she didn't recognise me in her delirium and the way her body rejected food. And of what a beautiful dress she wore and her head framed in snow-white flowers when I touched her marble-cold hand in the coffin. I was infuriated by the countless relatives I didn't really know, but they were writing to me everywhere they could find these completely identical messages. They wondered how I wasn't crying day and night with them: ah, you probably don’t realise what had happened yet, poor child, how are you going to be.

I was angry at my own hands, which wouldn't listen and shake when my emotions wouldn't come out when I couldn't do my makeup because I couldn't brush my eyelashes or hold a pencil in my hands. I had to fill the glass with water several times to get at least some of its contents to my lips. It was infuriating that it was easier to block out, to keep away the thoughts of what happened, to drive them far away, to enclose them with a Chinese wall, to bury them against the planet's core, to cover them with a cemetery earth, than to enjoy the good moments of the past. It was infuriating that with the death of a parent also die the stories of your childhood that you will never know about. Experiences you will never hear. It was infuriating when my father would get drunk and start telling everyone that she was the love of his life, omitting the cheating and the divorce. It didn't seem fair to me, but I kept quiet and only felt sticky about everything. It was infuriating to know that she would never be at my wedding. It still pisses me off that I want to talk to her. Then a week passes after her death, then a month passes after her death, then a year passes after her death, and I suddenly realise that I stop adding “after her death”.

It's been five years, but yesterday I had a dream about her, and I suddenly woke up and was frightened that I couldn't remember what she looked like before she got sick. I remembered myself as a little girl, looking at her feet, and her turning her back to me and changing in front of the mirror into the dress I was now wearing. I remember her in the last days before she died, but I can't remember the in-between. What her face really looked like. It was blurry like children whose souls are rescued by Instagram parents. I panicked and forced myself to list the details. So, we went to the movies. What movie? I remember we raced to Paris when she had a fight with my father, what were we doing there? I remember we fried apple pies, and I liked them better baked. I remembered the smell of butter and sugar and finally her eyes and lips and then everything else. That's when, for the first time in forever, I wanted to talk to her. I said:

Mom, you know, sometimes I'm glad you died before the war and don't see the horror we see. There was also the pandemic, but that's all a long story. Can you imagine, I left that apartment, which you and I had diligently repaired. Now I live in another country, and I'm not likely to go back to mine. There were times when it was very hard for me and I needed your advice. I was terribly angry that you could not give it to me and I felt small and helpless. But you would probably be proud that I am dealing with everything. I also got married and had a wonderful wedding, better than I could have dreamed of! You would have loved my husband for sure because he is incredible.

I wish you could see what I've become, like you, and completely different. When you died, I was afraid to approach you at the funeral, and I thought the walls of the church we were standing in were tilted at the wrong angle, and in a minute I'd be twisted along with them and not be able to take a step, but my friends held out their hands to me and it all stopped.

Sometimes I feel too strongly about my importance, and I still often need help, but now my loved ones and myself give it to me. I would like to brag about all that I have.

I've forgotten all your instructions, I still haven't quit smoking, and sometimes I drink too much wine. But I'm finally starting to let you go and stop being angry. I am grateful to you for everything. And now everything makes me happier instead of angry.

It makes me happy to have spontaneous meetings, it makes me happy to celebrate holidays, it makes me happy to wear sparkly eyeshadows, it makes me happy to go to exhibitions and argue about movies, it makes me happy to go on road trips, it makes me happy to hug and kiss in the morning, it makes me happy to grow avocados in glass vases, it makes me happy to have attention and endless dinners that I organise, now in the new home, it makes me happy that I have so much love and am so loved and thousands, billions, trillions more of little things and very important things that make up my life.

It gives a chance to cope with death.