The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) Read Online Free PDF Page B

insane pressure at work with a big new account, and I had Ethan to look after (being pigheaded, I also didn’t want to ask Matt for any favors). So I could only squeeze in three hours a day with her.

The end was fast. Rozella woke me at four a.m. last Tuesday, and simply said, ‘You must come now.’

Fortunately I had already worked out an emergency plan for this exact moment with a new-found friend named Christine - who lived two floors above me in my building, and was a fellow member of the Divorced Moms Club. Though Ethan loudly objected, I managed to get him out of bed and delivered him to Christine, who immediately put him back to bed on her sofa, relieved me of his school clothes, and promised to deliver him to Allan-Stevenson that morning.

Then I raced downstairs, got the doorman to find me a cab, and told the driver that I’d tip him five bucks if he could make it across town to 84th and West End in fifteen minutes.

He did it in ten. Which was a good thing - as Mom went just five minutes after I walked through the door.

I found Rozella standing at the foot of her bed, sobbing quietly. She put her arms around me, and whispered, ‘She’s here, but not here.’

That was a nice way of saying she had slipped into a coma. Which, honestly, was something of a relief to me - because I was secretly terrified of this deathbed scene. Of saying the right, final thing. Because there is no right or final thing to say. Anyway she couldn’t hear me now - so any melodramatic ‘I love you, Mom!’ proclamations would have been for my benefit alone. At a momentous moment like this one, words are less-than-cheap. And they couldn’t assuage the guilt I was feeling.

So I simply sat on the bed, and took Mom’s still-warm hand, and gripped it tightly, and tried to remember my first recollection of her, and suddenly saw her as an animated, pretty young woman holding my four-year-old hand as we walked to the playground in Riverside Park, and thought how this wasn’t a significant or crucial memory, just something ordinary, and how back then she was fifteen years younger than I am now, and how we forget all those walks to the park, and the emergency trips to the pediatrician with tonsillitis, and getting picked up after school, and being schlepped around town for shoes or clothes or Girl Scout meetings, and all the other scheduling minutiae that comes with being a parent, and how my mom always tried so hard with me, and how I could never really see that, and how I hated my neediness towards her, and wished that I could have somehow made her happier, and how, back when I was four, she would always go on the slide with me, always sit in the adjoining swing, rocking back and forth, and how, suddenly, there we were, mother and daughter swinging higher into the sky, an autumn day in ‘59, the sun shining, my world cozy, secure, loving, my mother laughing, and …

She took three sharp intakes of breath. Then there was silence. I must have sat there for another fifteen minutes, still holding her hand, feeling a gradual chill drift into her fingers. Eventually, Rozella gently took me by the shoulders and stood me upright. There were tears in her eyes, but none in mine. Perhaps because I was just too paralyzed to cry.

Rozella leaned over and shut Mom’s eyes. Then she crossed herself and said a Hail Mary. I engaged in a different sort of ritual: I went into the living room, poured myself a large Scotch, threw it back, then picked up the phone and dialed 911.

‘What kind of emergency do you want to report?’ asked the operator.

‘It’s not an emergency,’ I said. ‘Just a death.’

‘What sort of death?’

‘Natural.’ But I could have added: ‘A very quiet death. Dignified. Stoic. Borne without complaint’

My mother died the way she lived.

I stood by the bed, listening to Rozella wash up the dishes from the wake. Just three days ago Mom lay here. Out of nowhere I suddenly remembered something that a guy named Dave