A MOTHER AGO
I ENTERED THE HOSPITAL filled with hatred and wanting to give thanks. How fragile is anger. We could shout, hit or spit at a stranger. The same person whom, depending on their verdict, depending on whether they tell us what we are desperate to hear, we would suddenly admire, embrace, swear loyalty to. And that love would be a sincere one.
I went in not thinking anything, thinking about not thinking. I knew my mother’s present, my future, depended on the toss of a coin. And that that coin wasn’t in my hands, perhaps it was in nobody’s, not even those of the doctor. I have always thought that the absence of god relieves us of an intolerable burden. Yet more than once, when going in or out of a hospital, I have longed for divine mercy. Multitudinous, full of seats, corridors, hierarchies and rituals of hope, silent on their upper floors, hospitals are the closest thing to a cathedral we unbelievers can step into.
I went in trying to avoid this line of reasoning, because I feared I would end up praying like a hypocrite. I offered my arm to my mother, who had so often given me hers when the world was very big and my legs very short. Is it possible to shrink overnight? Can someone’s body turn into a sponge which, impregnated with fears, gains in density while losing volume? My mother seemed smaller, thinner, and yet more weighed down than before, as though prone on the floor. Her porous hand closed around mine. I imagined a little boy in a bathtub, naked, expectant, clutching a sponge. And I wanted to say something to my mother, and I didn’t know how to speak.
The proximity of death squeezes us in such a way that we might be capable of losing our convictions, of letting them ooze out like a liquid. Is that necessarily a weakness? Perhaps it is a final strength: to arrive somewhere we never expected to arrive. Death multiplies our attention. It wakes us twice. The first night I spent with my mother when they admitted her to hospital, or when she admitted herself to an area within herself, I confirmed a suspicion: some kinds of love cannot be requited. However much a child recompenses his parents, there will always remain a debt, shivering with cold. I have heard it said, I have said it myself, that no one asks to be born. But being born through another’s will is more of a commitment: someone has given us a gift. A gift which, as is customary, we didn’t ask for. The only coherent way of refusing it would be to kill oneself on the spot, without a word of complaint. And no one accompanying their stumbling mother, their shrunken mother to the hospital, would think of taking their own life. The life she gave them.
What was my mother’s illness? It doesn’t matter. It is the least important thing. It is out of focus. An illness that made her walk like a little girl, draw closer step by step to the ungainly creature she had been at the beginning of time. She confused the name and functions of her fingers as in an indecipherable game. She mixed up her words. She couldn’t walk straight. She bent over like a tree that mistrusts its branches.
We entered the hospital, we never finished going into it, the threshold was another country, a border within a border, and we were coming into the hospital, and someone tossed a coin, and the coin dropped. It is so basic that your reason loses the thread. An illness has its stages, its precedents, its causes. The drop of a coin, however, has no history or nuances. It is an event that burns itself out, that determines itself. Memory can suspend the coin, slow its ascent, recreate the tiny waverings during its trajectory. But those ruses are only possible after it has dropped. The original movement, the coin’s flight, belongs in an absolute present. And no one, I know that now, is capable of speculating while they watch a coin drop.