The Little Red Light House

My panting breathlessness -- I had run up the street from the garage -- my tears, and my wet hair were all excused by death's imminence. Justine, the night nurse who spoke in Staten Island tongues, had called an hour earlier and told me to come in. We had turned off the ventilator and did not know how long she would breathe unassisted.

I rushed into her room, half-expecting her to greet me. It is funny how we refuse to let illness take over as the status quo. I rushed into her room ready to be life's liason to death. I rushed into her room like the superhero a mother's death transforms her daughter into. When she passed I would take her soul in my body and express her. Now my body would carry us.

Outside the picture window a bright and ready day burst forth. A crisp, black cargo vessel accompanied by a shiny, candy-red tug (an hour later an identical pair would pass; over the next two weeks I would see many of these pairs) slugged across the window. Of course, there was a blue sky making these pronouncements possible. And the bridge. The bridge was portrayed happily in tangy orange light.

But more eager than all the rest of the day's vivid images was the little red light house. The storied little red light house! If she only knew that we could see it from her room! The little red light house that had mythic proportions in our childhood. There was the great George Washington bridge whose crossing in to New York meant that we were entering our father's space, the place where he worked, and that signified a voyage back in time, to the place where our family is from. Our grandparents and our parents. Williamsburg and the Upper West Side. The bridge -- it was intrepid and grand and eloquent in its articulation of our family history, of the present's return to the past.

And then there was the lighthouse. The hlighthouse that our approach to the bridge, from either New York or New Jersey, never allowed us to see. This invisibility, its storied smallness, and the children's book about it that we treasured when we were young made my brother and I feel akin to it. It was a child, somehow, like us. Dwarfed by the importance and size of the George Washington, but sweet and small and real and bright, it blinked its own light, waiting in the way children do to grow old. Whenever we crossed the bridge we tried to find it, but I don't think I ever saw it whole and as clearly, as I did over those weeks from her hospital room.

Maybe you can guess already from the imagery that I've chosen to include in this vignette that this story has a happy ending. No, my mother did not die that day, as she was expected to. Justine went off her shift, and the day nurse came in and suctioned her lungs, and she began breathing again, beautifully. She she still is. She has even begun to respond. A week ago I saw her eyes brighten when a physical therapist helped her sit up in bed, for the first time in months, and told her to look out the window at the little red light house.