The last two weeks

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur. And I’ve finally arrived back in Cupertino, only to have caught some throat crud that makes it hurt to swallow and has brought my energy levels down to a crawl. The first day back, I tore through 11 weeks of snail mail, balancing three months of checking and credit card statements and generally getting my finances in order. Now I’m bored, wandering around the house, trying to drink forty fathoms deep of hot tea, and mulling over the last two weeks. I just awoke from a nap on the couch, coughing, and remembered being sick once before like this and calling my mom and having her explain to me the nastiness that is post-nasal drip. And then I remembered that I wouldn’t ever be able to do that again.

I thought I had already said something about this in LJ, but looking back I see I haven’t. Maybe I’m thinking of some email I sent. Dunno; like I say, it’s all been a bit foggy. Anyway…

Two weeks ago, I was in Portland, OR. The road trip was all but over; the plan was to stay with Dan and Melody for a week or so, then do the last little bit down to Cupertino. I had pretty much decided I was going to be leaving the south bay and moving to the Portland area to live in the house I bought last year and that Dan had done such an extraordinary job renovating. Anita and I had made a spaghetti dinner for the household, with sliced italian sausage in it that had been very well received. At about 9:00 pm, the cell phone rang, and I picked it up to see it was my brother Allen. My initial reaction was to let it hit voicemail and I would call him back in the morning. But it didn’t take long for the wheels to start turning in my head. 9:00 pm my time would make it 11:00 pm Memphis time. And Allen just isn’t a “call-and-chat” kind of guy. For him to be calling so late, it probably meant something bad had happened. And something moderately bad he would have waited for morning to call, so it must be… I retrieved the voicemail and got a terse, “This is Allen, I need to talk to you as soon as possible. Please call me back.” in flat affect tones. I called him back and got him right away. He told me to sit down, and then said simply, “Diana’s gone.”

Over the course of that call, and another one the next morning, I got the full story. Mom had been between travel assignments and so was back in Memphis, or Millington to be more precise, living with my aunt and grandmother as was her habit when she wasn’t traveling. She had gotten a contract working the night shift at the Saint Francis emergency room, her preferred assignment when she could get it. She was on duty that night, bustling around, ordering people about, in typical mom fashion. Around 10:00 pm, she came around the corner to the nurses’ station, complaining of nausea, difficulty getting a breath, and some chest pains. She was immediately put into a wheelchair and taken down the hallway to what they call the “chest pain unit”. As they started down the hallway, Mom was alert and giving her medical history to the nurse, talking about various heart problems in the family. By the time they were at the end of the hall, Mom had collapsed. When they got her on a gurney, she wasn’t breathing. Within seconds, virtually the entire ER staff was working on her. They tried external stim, internal stim, the whole nine yards. But at 10:47 pm they finally had to give up. The medical examiner’s report would report her death as a “massive myocardial infarction”, a big damn heart attack.