Last night we received numerous calls from the alarm company that monitors my mother’s apartment. They have come infrequently while she was at the hospital because my sister and her husband are staying at the apartment. They’ve been busily packing up all her belongings to take back with them to Atlanta. Naturally, my sister believes everything is hers, so she is taking the flat screen television I recently bought mom, as well as other things that mom left me. My brothers have said just forgetaboutit. So vaya con dios is all I have to say – I wish her the best.
But last night we received these middle of the night alarm calls and they came on my cell and on our home line and they were shades of days gone by when we would have emergency calls about mom. We climbed back in bed, hearts racing, thinking back to those days when I wouldn’t turn my phone off at night for fear of my mother calling or paramedics calling or the sheriff’s office calling as we had been through one too many of these calls.
A photograph of Mom hangs in Tin’s room. I put together a book about Tin’s life before we adopted him based on the sketchy details that I have – a father with no last name, an iPhone photo of his birthmother, a faint photograph from Chuck E Cheese of his birth grandmother. The first photo is him at the Gary Airport, taken by our attorney’s iPhone and emailed to us, and the next is the same photograph of Mimi, my mother, that hangs in his room because we believe she had everything to do with his entry into our lives.
The discordance I felt with mom is gone now that she has passed, both T and I woke this morning after the evening’s anxious phone calls missing her tremendously, but then we took a deep breath, because there is a feeling of wholeness about mom now that has been a long time coming.
And of course, there is Tin.
Photo by Marc Pagani