The Day After Thanksgiving

“Are you Bradley Evans?” asked a nurse at my mother’s kidney dialysis center.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh Lord, we’ve been trying to reach someone. She had a stroke and was taken away in an ambulance.”

The day before was Thanksgiving. The table in the dining room was set with china Dad bought when he got home from a tour in Vietnam—white plates with a silver ring around them, timeless.

The house smelled of turkey and gravy, green bean casserole and crispy onions, mashed potatoes and butter—scents I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid.

A soft flame hovered over white candles. To my right was my son; to my left was Mom’s best friend—an ordinary holiday gathering. No doubt our neighbors were doing the same, as were their neighbors, and theirs too.

Mom made it halfway through the meal before needing a nap. She’d been cooking all day, using her walker to navigate her kitchen.

After supper, my kids and I shot Coke cans with a BB gun in the backyard. Afterwards, we played badminton, trying to beat our record for most consecutive volleys, but the wind wreaked havoc on every attempt.

Who knew that within a matter of hours, Mom would take ill.

I found her in the ER, the right side of her face contorted, trying to communicate. I’d later joke that her lip resembled Elvis’s smirk.

The doctor confirmed my biggest fear when he said she was in a “very serious state.”

I went back into her room and ran my hand through her hair. I looked into her eyes, knowing she was trapped in a neurological prison. A nurse kept calling her sweetie while telling me she’d been trying to talk, but all we could hear was an occasional mumble.

When things collapse, my instinct is pragmatic: get the facts, sort them out, breathe. My first thought was that Mom might be a vegetable for the rest of her life—if she lived. My second thought was that I needed to tell Dad, so I called him.

“It’s Brad. Mom had a stroke. She’s in the ER. I’m coming to get you.”

“Ok,” he said.

I could feel the blood drain from him. It’s amazing how a man’s constitution can be expressed so clearly in one word. Fifty-one years of marriage raced through his seventy-eight-year-old mind, along with his worst fear, all on display in that simple ok.

I stayed at the hospital with her for the next eight nights—two hundred and four hours of nurses, doctors, and hospital employees walking in and out at all hours.

She slept in a coma of sorts for the first few days, but she was rapidly coming back online. Her sentences began to make sense, the right side of her body healed, and after the effects of a life-saving medicine wore off, Mom was back—cheating death like a French Quarter hustler in a game of stud.

Every other day she had kidney dialysis via a massive machine that looked like it belonged in a recording studio.

On the seventh day, she had five stents placed in her heart, her only complaints being the discomfort of the operating table—and the hospital food.

On the last day, before being discharged, we watched college football and ate hamburgers I brought in. Before we knew it, she was being rolled out in a wheelchair with a healthier heart.

The morning after she got home, she was back at her computer.

I’ve long known she was tough—the daughter of Scottish immigrants who would no more complain than use the Lord’s name in vain. But in her darkest moments, and there were plenty of them, she returned to a dream she’d had in the hospital, where my dead brother, her youngest son, visited her and told her it wasn’t her time.

When I get to heaven, I’m going to find my brother and thank him.