"Let's watch it in the Spring." my Mom said as we attempted to watch a movie I bought her for Christmas in her hospital room January of last year. They had just come to give her pain medicine and as the medicine was strong she was about to be out of it very soon and she knew it. She told me that we could finish watching the movie in the Spring when I came home from graduate school. I was leaving my hometown and my mother the next day to return to Chicago and to my studies. She sent me on my way with promising thoughts of Spring.
I wasn't in Chicago very long, a week and a half, before I was told it would be best if I could return home as soon as I could.
When I returned, she looked like she aged 20 years in the short time I was away. Could this be my mother lying there? Could this be real? I smiled and tried to pretend I couldn't recognize the look of death on her face.
She lay on a hospital bed in the living room. The place was usually full of company. To be honest, I didn't even know all of the visitors names. The tv was always playing in the background. One night, after everyone else had gone, I turned the channels of the television only to find the movie we had been watching in her hospital room a few short weeks before. I thought about watching it, but then I thought "no, let's watch it in the Spring."