I remember when me and my brother were both young and we would play tag right alongside Mother. I remember when we used to play hide-and-go-seek with Mother, how we could never hide from her. I remember when Mother would get home and start doing the laundry, how I loved the sweet lilac smell of her wash. I still remember the night Mother had passed. A rare disease called dystrophic EB, had killed her. I still miss the days where she didn’t have to worry about the disease. Where she didn’t sit crying in her room, for want of an easier life, one where she could be free of the disease. But it had killed her, before she could do anything about it.
Now it is her birthday, December 12, 1932, and nobody could muster even the slightest whisper. Some tried to start a conversation, but the other would not respond. We couldn’t do anything but sit there, think about Mother, and try to do something to get the mood up. There wasn’t even a single soul there who could get us to do something other than mope around. When the time came to sing happy birthday, we could barely get the words out to sing without crying.
After mumbling happy birthday, we took our turns saying what we loved about Mother at the dinner table. We all loved her, and we all had wished that she had never gotten the disease that had so much pained her. We all poked at the cake, nobody really having any appetite at all for the cake being served.
When the time came for everyone to leave we all bid our farewells and watched everyone continue on to their warm and cozy homes while we had to clean up the aftermath of the solemn party. I went to my bed thinking, thinking about how Mother and I would have such a great time with each other. How great Mother was to me and my brother. All the fun Mother and I used to have. When our Mother wasn’t locked away in her room, crying.
Back when my brother and I was young Mother, Charles and I would go swimming in the pond at the back of our house. I had come to get very good at it by the time I was 12, much better than my older brother. Sometimes, we would to race, and I would always win, but whenever I would race Mother I could not beat her. A few times I had come close to it, but never actually accomplishing the task of beating her. When she had started to become sick, we could no longer race, because she was in her room, or at the doctor. When she first went, when she started getting the blisters, I remember when we went into his office. It wasn’t really what you would expect to walk into, especially for a doctor’s office, but it could have passed as one, if the doctor didn’t look the way he did. When we had went to the doctor to meet him, he introduced himself as Dr.Octagonapus, and he came out wearing one of the worst unkempt of coats, like it had been sitting in the attic for years, and that just that night he decided to wear it. Whenever he would walk near us he would always smell like mothballs and tobacco. Not the best of combinations, but we still had to deal with it every time we went to him. The top of his head was a very shabby looking thing, his hair always a mess, it looked like a bird had lived there for a few days and left. Whenever he would talk, he would have a light rasp at the back of his throat from time to time, and he would have to cough it up into the dingy trashcan he always kept in the corner of the room. His face would sometimes twitch, like a rabbit, kind of like he had a little itch on the tip of his nose but he didn’t want to reach up and scratch. If you caught him at the right angle he looked like a bloodhound, ready to snatch up a rubber toy.
By the time Mother had died, we had blamed the doctor, because he would just look at her wounds, say a few things for us to do, and then show us to the door. And every time we came back, he would always greet us the same way, like he didn’t know what else he could say to us. A few of the times we had gone, he had given Mother a vile of the most putrid smelling liquid that I had ever smelled. It smelled of dead cows and rotten fish, and Mother was told to apply the liquid to the blisters two times a day, without any other applications to the wounds. For months, we could always smell the stench coming from her bedroom whenever she had to put the mixture onto her skin. Of course, she thought it was helping, but we knew the concoction wasn’t helping, and we could see the blisters starting to get worse and worse every day. When the mixture was all out, we had asked Mother not to back to the doctor, but she had insisted that she would go, because at the time she had thought the doctors’ mixture was actually helping her.
Eventually, she had gotten so bad that she could barely make it to the bathroom, let alone the doctors’ office, so we had the burden of going to the doctor alone, without Mother, and then bringing the foul liquid back to her. We would knock on her door, and she would always say “come in, you don’t have to knock.” And when we went inside of her room, we would always say, “you need your privacy Mother, and we do not need to invade what little privacy you have left.” Sometimes, my brother and I would still go out into the pond and swim for a little while, and from time to time, mother would watch us from her bedside window, and smile at all the fun we used to have. She used to love swimming with us, it was her passion, though she could no longer swim, even though she yearned to do so once more. During her slow descent of health, when we had come back from the doctor, she had asked for only me to bring the vile into her room. So, my brother gave me the vile and I walked in. I will never forget what she had said to me that night, for what she said had changed my life for years to come. It was Christmas Eve, and she had said something that sometimes makes me cry, even to this day. She had said “Finn, now I know you and your brother, Charles, have been caring for me for quite some time now, and I am very grateful of that, so I thank you for doing so, but my health is not getting any better, so I have to tell you this now. I am not your real mother, Finn, and Charles is not your real brother, but your foster brother. Your father, when we had met, had badly wanted a child, boy or girl, but I could not present you into this world, for I do not have the necessary things to do so. When your father and I went to the orphanage where you and Charles had lived at the time, your brother was the first child we had seen, so we had really wanted you to come home with us. Of course, your brother had wanted you to come, but we weren’t sure if we could support you and your brother at the same time so, of course, we had to leave you and your brother there for a little while longer so that we could come up with a plan to support you the both of you. The next month, when we came back to pick you two up, your brother came skipping down the hallway, bouncing all over the place with excitement to have new parents. We had taken you home, and we had cared for the both of you. Then, sadly, one day had had an accident at work, and he was been killed by a train, for he was walking to the forwards to the train, slipped, then fell into the train tracks and got ran over. I know I have not been telling you the truth, and I know you will be mad at me for not telling you sooner, but I was trying to help you, to make sure you would not know what had happened to your father and why he is not around anymore. I will not be here much longer, I know so, and I love you. I have loved you like one of my own, and I always will, but I cannot hold on to this lifetime much longer. I love you, don’t ever forget that Finn. I love you with all of my heart, but I fear I will not be here to see the time you turn into a man. I have arranged for someone at the orphanage to come and pick you up tomorrow. Goodbye Finn, I will always be with you. Take this to remember me by, and never lose it. It was your fathers, and he would want you to have it.” She had opened my hand, placed something cold and metal like into it, and then closed my hand around it, looked deep into my eyes, and started crying.
Then she lay down onto her bed, and closed her eyes. That night was when I realized why I looked so much different than Mother and Charles. That night was when she had passed. The next day, when Christmas came around, Charles and I stayed in my room. We were both crying, not knowing what to do next. We called the ambulance, thinking we could bring her back but she was already gone. When the administrator came to pick us up, we packed up and left the house that all of our memories had been made in. we went to the funeral, and we tried not to cry, but failed anyways.
Every Christmas eve, Charles and I go to the house and swim in the pond. Thinking about the fun we used to have with Mother. Before we had to worry about her every day, before we had to bring the medicine into her room, before she had left this world, into another one to live in forever.
