I’m convinced it was those medicines that poisoned and extinguished her.
The morning of her final day was warm. The golden sun was melting the latest storm’s ice and snow, making the roads safer for travel. So Father sent Peter and Johan to a lumber mill with a list of supplies to buy. Watching them depart, I’d wished that I, too, could escape the misery of our house. I wanted to travel in our wagon with those relatively untroubled young men and drink in their vitality. How callous this was! When Mother had been expecting to die, had even asked for paper and pen and prepared her will. Yet none of us believed her. We thought the medicines and pain were turning her mind morbid.
As her daughter, and the nearest thing to her own flesh, I ought to have taken heed. I ought to have banished the doctor and his decoctions and sought out safer ways to ease her suffering. If only, at the very least, I had soothed her grief over dying at only forty-seven, with Peter not yet twenty and me twenty-two, and neither of us settled, and her husband sobbing in his workshop while her strength faded. If only I had found a place of calm within myself and tried, by my touch and voice, to transport her there.
By late that afternoon, Mother was vomiting often, and her mental state had worsened. She shifted from near catatonia to confusion to agitation. Father left, to buy more medicines, he said. Her last hours came soon after, and they seared me like a cattle brand.
I was walking away to fetch a cooling cloth for her forehead when a scream issued from the dearest person to me on earth. I turned to see her once-graceful body convulsing, gripped by unseeable sensations. Running to her side, I grabbed her hand. Her fingers were hot, like rods of fire, as if her remaining life was burning painfully away. Her face was scarlet. Even her eyes were changed, showing little but black. Then she began to make odd sounds I couldn’t recognize as words.
I lay alongside her and curled over her slender limbs, willing her excess heat to transfer to me.
“Shush,” I told her. “Rest easy. All will be well, Mother.” I repeated such assurances and held her for some unmeasured span and hoped Father would come home and prayed to God for mercy as she jerked and moaned and struggled to breathe, her heart pattering quickly against mine, until she ceased to move.
The closest church bell rang seven times to mark the hour when her spirit departed and death weighed her body down. It seemed she had been pulled into a sucking void, a void that drew my spirit swiftly after, rushing and pulling and stretching me forward but never bringing me nearer.
When Father returned from the dispensary, he found me curled about her stiffening body, my wet eyes and opened mouth pressed against her neck and cheek, calling, No, my dearest, come back, Mother. Father pulled me off and carried me before the main hearth. He set me up with a quilt, then left to find the doctor so the dreadful fellow could declare his patient dead.
My life’s order and beauty fell down flat—as if they had been nothing more than painted scenery.
*
Mother’s burial took place the next afternoon. Few of our kin remained in the region, having earlier sought land to the west and formed new Meetings. Yet after a silent Meeting for Worship, members swarmed the burying ground, along with dozens of neighbors and persons whom Mother had aided in her decades of charitable work. Old Hannah Purdes stood to my left. She’d been a lifelong friend to Mother’s mother and a ballast to Mother when others had called her too forthright. Hannah clasped my enfeebled body to her more solid one when the coffin bearers approached and laid the heavy box on the ground, and we stared into the gap in the earth that would soon devour Mother’s simple coffin. Reaching beneath my coat and shawl to my neck, I touched my gold locket, with its snippet of Mother’s hair and her tintype picture inside.
In the silence I recalled Lucretia Mott’s burial at Fairhill, when no one could speak until one mourner observed that the woman who’d spoken for us had died.
Two persons did speak at Mother’s burial. The first was Johan. He stood opposite the open grave from me and my family, the sun outlining his lanky frame, and said, “She was that rare human who loves and is loved by kin and stranger.”
This was a fitting tribute. A sigh passed through the crowd. The sun that glowed behind Johan seemed to come from within him.
Then I opened my mouth, and out came words of Lucretia Mott’s that Mother had admired: “If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?” A shiver passed along my spine.
The coffin was lowered; the men with shovels were at the ready. Soon Mother’s body would be covered by earth. All those present walked past the hole and streamed away. Some burst into speech as soon as they left the burying ground, but Father and Peter, Johan and I walked home in silence to face the gloom.
In my narrow bed I fell to staring into the air, and at nightfall I entered a nightmare-ridden sleep.
After passing most of another day in staring, I received a knock upon my door. It was Johan, suggesting that we go to the skating pond. Despite the weight of feeling that pressed me downward, I consented—for I had always loved immoderately to skate on ice.
My outlook remained dismal as we walked to the huge pond by Tulpehocken and Wayne and pulled on our skates—until I planted my feet on the ice, took one step, and sailed away. Oh, I relished that swiftness, the gathering of warmth under my clothes, the reddening of our eager faces in the glow of the lowering sun. Johan and I raced side by side across the pond, then followed its oval perimeter, panting whenever we spoke, our feet rising and gliding, rising and gliding, carrying our willing bodies through air that stung our cheeks and froze our eyelashes. Despite losing Mother, or even more because of it, I rejoiced in that vigorous and gladdening flight.
We stopped when the light grew dim enough to threaten our safe return homeward. As we changed into our boots, Johan held my mittened hand a moment and raised it to his mouth, exhaling heated breath to warm me. At his temples, from beneath his knitted cap, sweat trickled. His lips were wide and dry.
I wondered, Will I kiss those lips?
I thought, My husband.
And then, This foreknowledge can’t be rushed. I’ll live toward it till its prediction comes to pass, or doesn’t.