Condemned

   The Department of Correction in my state is executing or trying to execute killers this month, and current and former co-workers are journalists-on-the-spot, covering the struggle, experiencing the experience, furthering their careers. Two strong minds sit right beside me, Eric and John, and I hear them on the phone, digging, polite but pressing, and in consultation, energized. Strong. 
   Apart from the awful importance of what's going on, separately and persistently, I brood about ambition and wonder whatever happened to mine. Did I never have any? Was all that yakking about duty to one’s talent back in high school just transient, flimsy self-importance? 
   I think that, yes, it must have been.
   And now here I am in the final third of what will be my lifetime, watching my mother decay in a bed. Her life — big, really, and full of giving and doing — has narrowed down to a rigid but alive carcass incompletely monitored by a mind deprived of facts. Sunday she told me, as though I wasn’t there, “I guess Julia Loyall isn’t ever going to die.” 
   It sounded like regret.
   The Mom I dismissed when I was in high school today hardly exists in my memory. Instead I’m consumed by the image of young mom, Julie Lynch, child of immigrants. Pretty, thwarted, funny and fun-loving.
   My chest twists as I think about that child while looking at today’s puzzled, childlike person who presses her index finger into her mouth and says, “Some of them are gone” — her teeth.

   Last night I dreamed I was surrounded by angry young women. All of them looked like a former co-worker who was a genuine little crusader, always shaking her fist at injustice. All these small women were shaking their fists, at me: “It’s too easy to go on going back and forth in your middle-class comfort, limp as a ragdoll, while we are fighting for a better world. You waste your time.”
   I remember arguing with them/her eloquently. I said something like (and yes, I do have a prissy vocabulary), “We live in a world of pain and surcease of suffering is impossible here. There is darkness everywhere, touching every life. But don't you understand that it’s arrogant to see nothing but the bad and no good life other than marching and arguing all day? It’s naive to dismiss the good world, the light and hope, healing and helping: children, learning, beautiful flowers, dear faces, sweet memories, friends, silliness, jokes, music and joy. If we insist on showing that light to the darkness, we also are fighting the fight. We are. I am.”
   Michael tells me I was snoring lustily when he left for work.

   But I woke up feeling dim and sad anyway.
   I wish poor Mom had not lost her lower teeth. I wish her body was not dissolving.

Thumper

   If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.
   Whatever Bambi’s mother thought she was saying, that sentence doesn’t say, “Say nothing.”
   I’ve worried about that since ... I’m not sure when they first took me to see Bambi. I do know it wasn’t on my fifth birthday, because after that little family gathering — at which Mom gave me a maroon leather and tan straw purse with a domed lid and a dime tucked neatly inside, and a little mirror — we piled into the Hudson and were driven across the late afternoon to a movie theater where the adults discovered to my (I’m sure it was vocal) disappointment that Bambi wasn’t showing. After some discussion (“We should have called ahead”), it was decided we’d see Big Red instead, even though who knew anything about it? 
   All I remember is a dog jumping through a window.
   But later we owned a record album of the original Bambi soundtrack, which etched deep crevices in my brain as surely as brother Joe and I etched through the tracks by playing that disc over and over and over for years.
   “Your mother has gone away. She can’t be with you anymore. You must be strong and learn to live by yourself.”
   Bambi’s father hasn’t delivered the bad news to horrified audiences quite that way for decades. But that is what he said back when I was listening. 

   Mom’s usual spring allergies have filled her lungs with congestion. This is the third spring in the nursing home, the third spring she hasn’t been able to sit up or move around to make the stuff move out of her lungs. And so it makes her cough so hard she might break a rib. Seriously.
   And two of her lower teeth broke off. 
   I knew about the congestion and was feeling OK about how we’d decided to help her — cough syrup and Claritin — but I didn’t know about the teeth. The last few weeks she’d been asleep every time I visited. She was asleep and I sat beside her a while looking at the flowers before going away. So when the hospice nurse called to tell me she’d ordered ground foods for her, I thought it was just because her teeth have been so loose. I didn’t know they were gone. 

   What if Bambi’s father had told the young prince of the forest something like that?
   “Your mother’s teeth have gone away. She will not have them anymore. She misses them. There is nothing you can do.”