Today he’s twenty one, she thought. Today I begged Jesus to help me or we’d both die, and yet, today, I am alone.
He was a perfect baby. Really, just perfect. Beautifully made, exquisitely assembled. Sweet little smile. He charmed everyone before he was old enough to know what that meant. It was his disposition. He knew intuitively how to make everyone around him feel as though he or she were the only one in the room who mattered. She always felt that way, that he loved her more than anyone, but then she was his mother. He did love her more.
Usually on his birthday she’d bring a cake and take it to the the hospital where he was born, but not this birthday. This birthday was too hard. He wouldn’t be there.
He was gone.
The idiots on the ward let him go. He was old enough to make his own decisions, they said. They didn’t need her permission. He said not to tell her in advance, so she wasn’t even there when he left. They told her that he thought it would be easier for her that way. Easier not to watch him die. She was there when he was born, she said, she should have been there when he died. If he was going to go first, she should have been there. She should have been there to smooth the hair from his eyes. She should have been there. She should have been.
She lived in a small, efficient flat. She didn’t cook large meals. He lived in the hospital for the past eight years. She rarely cooked anything at all, so the single burner and the microwave were plenty, and the tiny refrigerator was large enough for water bottles and a half-dozen cubes of ice.
Her days had been spent walking back and forth to the hospital and caring for him. The nurses told her that they would do everything if she’d only let them, but she didn’t want them to. She bathed him and clothed him. She brought home his laundry and returned it. She brushed his teeth and shaved the stubble from his chin. He’d been so proud of that stubble. So proud to be a man.
It was a wicked illness that brought him down. A stupid, illogical, wicked illness. He’d gone to the river with friends one weekend. They’d all been swinging on a rope from a tree on a tall bank to the deepest part of the river where they’d drop in then swim back to shore for another turn. He’d cut his leg the week before walking through the garage. Scraped it on some stray piece of metal. He had burns on his hands from the rope. And somehow he, not anyone else, just he had developed sepsis in those small cuts.
It ate through him in a flash, and the surgeons kept cutting away parts of him trying to stop it until so little of him was left that he couldn’t survive outside the hospital.
And so he lived there in his room throughout his adolescence and into adulthood dependent on tubes and lines and beeping machines until today when he came of legal age and could authorize death for himself. Today, just after midnight in the cold morning hours, he told them to turn off his machines, and in minutes, he was gone.
He’d made plans. He told them when to call her, not until after 6AM when she would have already woken; he told them what to say, had written it out, had calculated each word to be as soft as possible when they told her the news. But the shock still stabbed. The hurt, the horrible ripping pain that she didn’t have the chance to look into his eyes once more, just once to see the life sparkle in them. That hurt would never, never go away. She wanted to hate them all. But then, to think of her little boy who grew to be a man in an antiseptic world, she understood that this was his adulthood. His decision to die was the decision of an adult who had one chance to rule his world, and he took it. Deciding to die alone without his mother was an adult decision. Every mother faces the moment when her son becomes a man, when she has to let go and let him take command of his own life. This was her moment.
And now there was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. All the planning was done, and the hospital had already placed the necessary phone calls. There was just time ahead. Dead, empty time.
Sometime in the afternoon, the phone rang.
“Clara? This is Bonnie.”
“Hello, Bonnie.” Bonnie was his nurse. Had been his nurse.
“Clara, I know...I know today is hard...but look, do you still have the cake?”
“What?”
“His cake. Do you still have the cake? There’s a little girl here...there’s no family...it's her birthday.”
“The cake? You need the cake?”
“Yeah. If you still have it?”
“Yeah, yes, it’s right here. You need a cake?” Clara couldn’t understand why Bonnie was calling her.
“Bring it here, would you, Clara? Bring it for the little girl?”
“ What? Bring the cake?”
“Bring the cake for the little girl without a family?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Right now?”
“Now would be good, Clara, if you can.”
“Sure, I’ll be there in a while.”
“Okay. Just look for me. I’ll help you find her.”
Clara looked around the kitchen trying to remember a cake. She’d had a cake for his birthday, but what did she do with it? It wasn’t on the counter. Oh. Sure. She shoved it into the garbage disposal. She’d have to get another.
She pulled her sweater on, splashed water on her face and ran her hands through her greying hair while she looked at herself in the mirror. Good enough. It doesn’t matter anymore. The sweater she took from the hanger at the door was ancient. Her own mother had knitted it 40 years before then put it into a drawer because she thought it wasn’t good enough to wear. She’d found it when she’d cleaned out her mother’s house. It was made of good wool in cable-knit without any flaws she could see. Her mother was always a perfectionist. It a thing wasn't done perfectly, it wasn’t worth having, but she’d stored the sweater in a drawer rather than throw it away, and Clara took to wearing it like a hug. Even an imperfect hug was good these days.
The walk to the hospital led her past a side street where the little bakery was. It was the neighborhood bakery where people bought the sweets that helped them celebrate the milestones in their lives or sometimes sweeten the grief that fell upon them. The bell jingled when she walked in.
“Clara! Hey! Was something wrong with the cake?” The lady behind the counter knew what day this was. She’d made cakes Clara’s son every year practically his whole life. The order was on her permanent calendar. “How’s Joe today?”
Clara looked up at her. Words ran through her mind, but her tongue was numb. She shook her head slightly. She peered through the bowed glass case at the cakes. “I need that pink cake today. The one with the tiny white flowers, please.”