Coconut Fruit Bars

It was an innocent enough night, as I say in what used ot be my moms chair and ate ice cream while hanging out with dad.  He was eating a fruit bar.  And when I realized what he was eating it was like a nail to my heart, and it hasn't stopped pounding since that moment. 

I want a cigarette.  I want it to slow down.  I want to be under the stars.  I want my mom back.  I would trade the whole world for her physcial human existence again.  

The night we took her to the hospital for the last time she was in bed, the bed in which she hadn't left for about a week.  She stopped getting out of bed when she fell in the shower because her left hip would just no longer work.  It was a downhill spiral from there.  Which led to bed pans, hospice, medications, and endless silence.

I came upstairs to check on her and touch her hand and offer some food, which she had just not been interested in the past week or so.  She asked me if we had any coconut fruit bars in the freezer.  I would have flown to fuckin Egypt to get her one, lucky enough, we still had some.  I brought it up in a bowl so that she could rest it when she was too tried to hold it up.  

I sat with her and watched her struggle through.  Her left hand had quit working, or maybe it was her wrist, or maybe it was the whole arm.  Either way, she would be holding the bar and then it would just drop, hand and all, onto her chest.  Typically this sent her into a frustrated frenzy of "What is happening to me"  and "I do not understand what is going on".. but that night, she just picked it up and took nibbles while she could.  

I have never seen anyone enjoy something so much.  

Normally I would have pestered her and nagged her to drink carrot juice or have something more substantial, but I just knew, there was a peace to her eating this bar, and I was just happy to see HER so happy.  

It was both gut wrenching and joyful to see her in this process.  I knew what was coming, though nothing could have prepared me, and I seemed to be the only one in my immediate family that understood that she was leaving us.  I had known for months.  And here we were sitting together, her half aware lost in the delicacy of a coconut fruit popsicle, and me lost in the simplicity of it all.  

It was not too many hours later that she asked to go to the hospital, which became the desperate turmoil that loss like this is in those fucked up, confusing, hectic moments.  The ups and downs, the really fuckin hard conversations, the even worse decisions....  

And until now, I had forgotten about that sacred coconut fruit popsicle, not that banana coconut one, (which I had mistakenly grabbed first), but the simple, single flavor one...  over a year later and out of the blue it hit me like a bus to the chest, and now I am a mess of tears, in my room writing this recalling the depth of pain that is her loss.  

All over the memory of a popsicle.