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.”