The Mothers are Crying (1974)

My mother called from a telephone booth at Sloan Kettering. "If it's what the doctors think it is," she sounded so sad, "your father has, at most, six months left to live." She ran out of coins for the phone and the call ended abruptly. 

That was the day President Nixon resigned. I was wearing cutoff blue jean shorts and my favorite red-checked shirt. My father died six months later, to the day, having outlived two dire predictions already in a slow march that lasted a bit more than two years. 

In the days before hospice, he asked his doctors to turn off the experimental chemo. When he came home from the hospital, he said, "I want to be with my girls." 

Those last six months he drifted in and out of waking consciousness. A few times, after school or before he went to bed, I caught him on the verge of another place, places he had been and places he was going without me. I turned sixteen in those six months. I had no concept of death until the morning he died at home. Before the sun was up, my sister found him unconscious on the bedroom floor. 

My first taste of his death, the place where past, present, and future are blurred, started with a Scrabble game. My sister didn't want to play, so I invited my friend Joan over to take her place. My mom would win. She always won. She was the wizard of words, the Grand National Debate Champion at Penn State, the fiercest competitor I've ever known up close. My father and I loved the magic feel of just the right word, and we loved to challenge her. 

But almost as soon as we started, I sensed something was wrong. My father was moving his tiles around, but not putting them on the board. 

"Mom, I think his mind is somewhere else," I said quietly, so he wouldn't hear and she wouldn't feel my words as an assault. 

"It's that damn cancer messing with his brain," she said, breathing in through her Kent cigarette and then stomping it out in an ashtray. "I'm going to call his doctor and take him to the emergency room." 

She stayed up all night with him, taking notes on a legal pad, as his thoughts shattered and fell out as single words, and then the moaning of a child inside the body of an adult man.

The next morning, when she came home to shower and get dressed for work, she left that legal pad on the kitchen counter. 

I found it before I went to school, pages and pages, first in my father's writing and then hers. "Nagasaki … only the other Marines understand … rubble everywhere … children screaming in search of their mothers … the mothers are crying, inconsolable." 

The doctors patched him up with steroids and a cocktail of other drugs and sent him home two days later. Almost as soon as he got home, I asked, "What were you talking about? What did you see that night?" 

"Carol, honey," he spoke very slowly, almost in a whisper, "some stories are so painful they just shouldn't be told."