Mother

Memories of my mother are dim, but must suffice. One day we sat on the grass shelling peas. Another day, we got on a bus somewhere under the George Washington Bridge on the New York side, my mother said, “ We were escaping to nowhere”. We went away with her to Sunny Oaks, I remember laying with my head on her stomach which had a scar that seemed endless. The Italian neighbors, who lived behind us tried to keep her healthy with vegetable drinks from their truck garden. It was confusing. Our house was hectic people cried all the time, my brother and I were kept out of her room. Relatives came, remember them yelling at us to keep quiet, nurses moved in until the ambulance arrived. She was gone, don’t remember talking to her, or saying that I loved her. We went to the hospital and had to stay on the street and wave to a window, which one, who knows. Came home, and I waited for her to come back, she did not. Found out she was dead from our housekeeper, I ran out of the house with my brother. From then on we were the Cancer Children. Years later found out that my father never claimed my mother’s body. She was buried in my Uncle Sam’s plot. The writing on the stone was fading-Rose devoted wife and mother.