The Most Beautiful Thing

The Most Beautiful Thing
Ben Shinrock

Her second-to-last coherent request was to see the sunrise. It came in between the midnight moans and the one-o-clock conversation with her dead mother. I was caught by complete surprise.
After she asked, I made my way to her bed through the catacombs of flowers and gifts from well-wishers, family, and superficial assholes who only care when someone else is more miserable than they are. I took her hand in mine and assured her that the sun was going to rise just like it always did. I was both right and wrong at the same time.
There were more flowers in that hospital room than there were at her funeral, more flowers than I was sure existed. I couldn’t name half of them. There were a few she didn’t even know. I still don’t understand. Is it more comfortable to die knowing that you’re surrounded by flowers? I never saw the point. But at least she had a smile on her face when she would look at them, assuming that she wasn’t smiling from the constant morphine high she was living in. No, whenever she looked at all those flowers - especially the white roses; those were her favorite - a light clicked on inside her head, shining through her eyes like it used to when she was proud of me. That look had always made me feel awkward. Modesty is the best policy. Until she started dying. Then that look said so much more than I could ever know. That look was life; the only life left inside of her. I cried every time she made it.
There were times when I could still talk to her and she could still listen. Before the very end, when she was still my mother and not an animated corpse. Looking back, I can’t remember what we talked about, and that makes me feel the worst. I knew she was dying, and I didn’t even listen to what she had to say. If you’re ever with someone in their last few days on this planet, pay close attention to every word they say, especially if it’s your mother. You never like to hear them when you know that they’ll be talking to you tomorrow, but it’s a little different when you can’t be sure. I took my mother for granted my whole life, even when I knew that she was leaving. For that I can’t forgive myself.
The times that she would talk to herself, lapsing in and out of consciousness, stringing little bits of nonsensical mumbling together in confusing chains, were the only times I really listened to her. She talked to her mother most often, usually about decorating the study or brilliant new recipes or babysitting her brother or the fights they used to have. She never yelled at her mother in her drug world, only talked in her once-beautifully dark voice, now cracked and harsh with plastic tubes jammed down her throat and up her nose. It was calming in a hysterically morbid sort of way to listen to her. She was there, but she really was somewhere else, where she was still happy, still young, still healthy, still alive. I thought the best thing for her was to pretend. It wasn’t the best thing for me.
She had asked to see the sun, possibly one last time, and I told her she would. No, I downright believed that she would. For that moment, the extent of her life relied solely on my belief that she could still live. People dream of power, but there is no greater power than holding your dying mother’s hand, trying to convince her that she would live through the night. I was a god at that moment. Her life was completely and totally up to me. Nobody ever dreams of that kind of power.
She asked to see the sun. Not, Oh God, let me heal. Not, Don’t let me die, I’m too young. Not, I would give anything to stay alive. The sun. She had given up. I knew it, and she knew that I knew it. Behind her shell, inside where a scrap of her still existed, she was giving up. Her bags were packed and Maui was coming up in the windshield at a million miles per hour. I realized that I had nothing. No power over life and death, no control of anything, no reason to hold on to her. She was already gone. But for that one moment, that one question, she came back to say good-bye. And I still didn’t listen.
She never got to see the sun. She died at 5:36. Two minutes before sunrise. God sucks.
5:35. She said the last coherent thing she would ever say. She thought the last thought she would ever think. She sat up, above the pain, the death, the end. She sat up and looked right at me. My mother looked right at me, my real mother. Her eyes lit up and she was alive. For the last five seconds of her life she was truly alive. She smiled at me and my heart broke. She leaned forward and asked me to say something beautiful. I told her I loved her. That was good enough.