It was early in the afternoon and I was getting ready to go to practice. My grandmother asked for the stethoscope I had for my Red Cross training; I wanted to be a doctor one day. She was my father’s mother and, in all honesty, not someone I cared for too much at the time. My mother’s father had just passed and he, along with my mother, were the two people I felt most connected to. I laughed in his hospital room, I cried next to him and he told me to stop. I gave his lifeless body a bracelet I had made. I thought I was at peace but I was 14 years old and had never had such a close encounter with death. I was held back as his casket lowered into the ground. I screamed and I shrieked and I cried the loudest I ever have in hopes that something would change, that someone with the power to change this would hear me, but no one heard me, no one answered. I had no friends and people made fun of my hair and the way I would speak; I was called a spic and I didn’t even know what that meant. I was lost and I could talk to no one.
One day, months later, my parents called me into their room. I sat down on a couch facing my mother sitting on the side of her bed in the green room, green from the walls, from the sheets, from her paintings of nature, from the balcony overlooking our garden. It was spring in Mexico and the sun shone through the windows. They started telling me about how my mother would be gone soon and what would happen if something were to happen to my father; I immediately started crying and begged them to stop. They did, “okay, okay, Moy, it’s okay, we don’t have to talk about it now,” my mother said, lovingly. I think that was the last time I felt true fear, pure and raw; my body trembled and there was nowhere to go.
I gave the stethoscope to my grandmother and she ran to the green room. She pressed it against my mother’s chest as I stood by the door watching her confusion, her lack of conclusion, watching my father pick up the phone, hearing her urge my father to call the doctor, watching my mother’s frail body, seeing her eyes for one last time. I stood in my uniform, I stood broken but relieved, relieved from a five year long sorrow, relieved from her pain, relieved from her cancer. I stood as my father asked me if I wanted to stay or go; I did not know it yet but that question was going to be the theme of my life. It was a Thursday and that Saturday I got first place at a tournament. My mother was a fighter. I was a fighter. I left. I went, forever to be haunted by that green room. I was fifteen but it had been long since I had been a boy. I went to school the next day and I kept training. I lived my life and I didn’t tell anyone for two years.
One time, many years later, I was told I would die alone. The thing is, the only two people that have ever made me feel like I was not alone have been gone for eight years. Alone is not something I can shake off. Part of me wants to say I died as the dirt hit my grandfather’s casket, that I died as my grandmother closed my mother’s eyes, that I died in that doorway because I think when I do die, if I die alone, those memories, the fact that they didn’t die alone will make it okay.
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