Finding Peace in the Hospital Room, Summer, 1990

Whenever I find myself in the hospital room, standing next to the bed on which is resting my dead mother, which is many, many times in indecipherable spans of time, I am looking at the window. It is June 14, which means I am nearly exactly 17.5 years old. I am staring at the white blinds, which are slanted open so, and I look through countless strips of plastic, I am looking at the sky. The sky is blue. Above the top of the concrete roof of the fifth floor of the other wing of The Hospital, the sky is blue. It’s that clear, clear, clear, clean, lightish blue. The kind of blue that only happens for a little bit of time, on days with a slight breeze, and little pollution. Danny and I–Danny Lee Clark Junior (he’s dead now, too) and I–had left the trailer in San Jose, after the call came, around 7:30 a.m.

Now, it was around 9:30. It wasn’t yet 10:00. The light would be less clear at 10:00. It would start to look hot. And it was, after all, June. June 14th. 1990. I look at my mother. I look at her. She looks peaceful. I’d never seen her look so peaceful. Ever. The bandage wrapped around the top of her head was neat, and clean, and white. It only covered the top of her eyebrows.  I would not–did not–think about the bloody wound hiding beneath the clean, white dressing. I realized that I’d never seen her face so smooth, the lines around her eyes had softer. Everything about her make me thing that she was, at last, in peace.