The 7:40 Alarm, Mom Loses a Limb

Dream: Mom Loses a Limb

My 7:30am alarm woke me. I fell back to sleep.

I was visiting with my mom. She was in a hospital recovery room. She looked melancholy, defeated. I knew this look well. I recognized it, but couldn’t  remember from where. It was just oddly familiar, that look.

I felt uncomfortable and looked away. Neither of us said anything. When I looked back mom’s leg was separated at the knee and she was lowering it down to reconnect it. I only caught the last moment of this but I was shocked by the physicality, the reality of it. I looked at her with a long wordless stare. She said nothing for a long time.

Then she said, “The doctor, she kept chopping away at it.” The implication was that it started as a small thing and eventually came to this. I couldn’t tell where the real leg ended and the faux leg started. I was confused by how it fused together. She seemed really sad that I now knew this.

I examined her leg. I lifted it from the ankle and held it up to look down the length. I expected to see the seam where the amputation mets the prosthetic but I could not. She said something about the high quality of the work. There was an ornate patterned fabric seam down the inside and outside of her leg that made it a continuous leg, an uninterrupted pattern. I was confused as to how it could have been two pieces a moment ago.

She told me that it is two pieces but doesn’t say where, she only implies that it is sad how much is gone.

She said that the problem is getting healthy food. She says it is hard to get the food she needs to stay healthy, the implication was—to stay whole. I inferred that without the right food she would continue to lose parts of herself.

I suggested she should come live with me, that I have a Whole Foods nearby and I can get all she needs. As I’m saying this I am thinking about how I let this happen. How did it come to this? How did I not do something about this sooner? I am lost in time. I can’t seem to reconcile that something feels off, but that thought feels unimportant given the situation in front of me. I am trying to grapple with the impact of my mom losing part of her leg, trying to imagine the impact to our lives, how she feels.

Her illness is apparently dietary, as she has said, but something in my mind remembers differently and it is impossible to reconcile the two feelings.

I wake up to the 7:40 alarm.

I am aware of my bed and the real morning darkness. I am comforted by the fact that my mom didn’t lose part of her leg. I am relieved that she is okay. It was just a dream. My shoulder, my arm, are both asleep, I can’t feel them, and I struggle to turn over, to become untwisted. 

Then awareness slowly crawls over my consciousness that something isn’t right about my mom. Something I can’t remember. Then reality, life in the moment, floats upward with the last pieces of consciousness, and I realize she is dead.

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