I have Ruffles and Coke. With ice. Mom would get it.
The talking heads on the news keep telling me that this is the fifth anniversary of Katrina, but to me, they’re burying the lead. Katrina was background noise five years ago. The real story was in the bed in the hospital room where my mother lay dying.
My mother was a tiny woman with hidden strength. And I’m not talking about that wispy emotional strength everyone attributes to their mothers. She had that, too, but Mom was just plain tough. She had polio and spent years of her childhood at the roller rink, crying her way through lap after lap as she stretched her Achilles’ tendons. She had metal rods in her legs, but she never used a cane; hardly even limped. 
Barely out of her teens, she lost all her teeth in a car accident when her mouth collided with the steering wheel. She chewed peanuts with her gums to toughen them up for the dentures she would wear the rest of her life. Five sons who towered over her not-quite-five-foot frame each foolishly tested her will at some point in our teens; I don’t think any of us did it twice.
So when I walked into her hospital room five years ago and saw her lying there connected to tubes and wires, I was shaken to see her looking so frail. The cancer we thought they had cut out of her uterus had made its way to her lungs, and then to her brain. She smiled weakly and mumbled something at me; everyone else in the room acted like she had jumped up and hugged me. Once I got over the initial shock, I settled in with my brother and sisters for the long wait. A table with a few chairs stood in the corner, and my sister had piled it high with snacks, including Mom’s cure for everything from the common cold to a broken heart, Ruffles and Coke. With ice. The only thing missing from Mom’s “Had a Bad Day, Kid?” sampler platter was a jigsaw puzzle, and I think we’d have set one up if there had been room.
The long night became a long day, which became another long night and longer day, and eventually somebody cracked and turned on the TV. Hurricane Katrina. It just didn’t sink in. We were busy watching every single ragged breath Mom took. Those breaths got more and more ragged, and one evening my sister, a nurse who knows a thing or three about this sort of thing, called us around Mom’s bed. We cried and prayed and sang and hugged her and did all the things you do when it’s time. We waited for her last breath to come. And waited. And waited.
She just kept taking them. Because Mom was just plain tough, her body didn’t get the hint that she was about to die. I think my sister felt a little foolish for telling us it was time, but I think she was right. Mom was different after that night. Her doctor told us that her body might take days or weeks to catch up to … he didn’t say soul. I filled that in myself. So I went back to Chicago. Early the next week, I got the call.
Mom died August 30, 2005. She was the strongest person I have ever known, and while I’ve come to recognize her failings more and more in the years since she died, I am proud to be her son. She never quit giving. She loved unconditionally. And she was damn near unsinkable. Sometimes I worry I don’t live up to the example she set. Well, ok, every minute of every day I am absolutely convinced that I don’t live up to the example she set. But I can try again today.
After Ruffles and a Coke. With ice. Mom, I hope one day I get it.
