Not at all being
what I’d expected,
at a time so quenched
with the incontrovertible,
and when the power of originality
was flooding my life with rapid regularity -
that night, an anemic voice on the other end
of the phone was sobbing tearfully…
.
“Your Mom collapsed.
She was rushed to emergency…”
.
A cryptic chill gripped me
as I cradled the receiver, and
in a ratcheting blue of disbelief,
I began to feel what
seemed like heavy hands
squeezing down on my heart…
But there were no impressions
keener than what began
rushing through me in those
emotionally fraught moments,
another test
perhaps
of faith engaging
like four-wheel drive,
assuring me the rough terrain
ahead could be overcome, and
that God would hear my prayers, and
Mom might be healed and up carrying on
again in that dear character she’d mastered
of an eccentric FLOWER loving people
in her own unique way…
.
But my attempts were fruitless.
Prayer, and the laying on of hands,
(there, in a dimly lit emergency room)
came to naught, as mom fell helplessly
into a coma - a brain aneurism exacerbated
from both the Scarlet Fever she’d had in her youth,
and those nine months at Patton State Hospital,
where white-coated demons (with PhD’s)
made mush of her mind and heart….
.
Fraught
(in a calculated
attempt, or just to bilk
the insurance company) surgeons
rushed to cut into her skull to
remedy the burst vein, but
their efforts too
were fruitless,
and after ‘being’ for seventy-two years,
Mom passed, unrecognizable, imbrued with tears,
from this plane of existence, into the hope of
her faith, Christ Jesus…
.
On the dawn of that morning,
when thunder was roaring,
the winds and the rains
beat her down.
In that field of confusions,
they watched and they listened,
but few got to stand by her side.
In the winds and the thunders
they stopped and they wondered,
while tears and the rains became one.
As they watched and they listened,
to hear her singing, the FLOWER
laid down . . . . . . and died.
.
© richard lloyd cederberg
1998 - Edited 5/2023
.
THE PORTRAYAL SERIES: Poetiprose insights concerning my immediate family and old friends. This series will also address certain of the actors, artists, musicians, and writers I worked with in college, or professionally, that were influential (in one way or another) in shaping the man I am today.