I watched my mother die.
My mother was an artist; a writer of strange, yet intoxicating skill. Words would flow out of her and onto the page in the same beautifully majestic way color flows from a painter’s brush. Each and every word would call out to you and grip your heart, each passage leaving you excited, nervous and always wanting more.
The prime of her writing all started when she got a letter in the mail one day from a fan. It came in a small little red envelope, with a raven seal pressed in golden wax. I will never know what the letter said, but I can remember the look in my mother’s eyes when she broke the seal and unfolded the parchment inside. Her entire face lit up and you could hear her take in a breath so deep it as if it were the first time she’d tasted air. Her entire body seemed to float and she reached for her fountain pen with an urgency I’d never seen before. She spent that entire night composing a letter to send back to this fan.
On the very next day, she immediately sat down at her desk and began to write a story. She sat at her desk each and every day with an incredible passion as she wrote her heart out and bared everything she was on the pages. All the while, the red envelopes would continue to come, and with that same excitement in her eyes, my mother would continue to open them and send her replies. As time went by, my mother would publish smaller pieces of work that made her increasingly popular, but it was obvious that her real heart and soul was in this story that laid unfinished at her desk.
My father was also a writer, but was always away from home. There was a difference between his art and my mother’s. My father worked for people, wrote what people wanted him to write, spent hours away in offices as he revised and revised again under the constant pressure and expectations of others. On the other hand, while my mother was a popular writer in her own right, she wrote for no one but herself. Father would often come home late and would see my mother working at her desk. She never asked him about his suspiciously late nights, and he never asked her about the red envelopes that were piling up on her desk. He would come over, give her a kiss on the head, and walk away in silence. He never showed a particular interest in her art, just as she had a hard time mustering interest in his. Their love for the written word is what had brought them together, but while they had dreams for their future together, they were never able to truly inspire each other. Yet, for some reason, this mysterious fan inside of the red envelopes had unlocked the door to all of my mother’s potential.
That was until the red envelopes stopped coming. The first week went by and I could see the disappointment in my mother’s eyes, but despite that I could see her still trying to channel herself into her work. One week turned into two weeks; two weeks turned into two months. Time continued to go by and as I saw the light in my mother’s eyes withering away, even I began to wait anxiously at the door for the post every day, praying to see that splash of red mixed among the white… but it never came.
I kept hoping that father would notice, but every day it was still the same. He’d come home late, walk over to her desk, kiss her on the head and then go about his own business. Could he not tell? Every single day I saw one more piece of my mother flake away. How did he not see it too?
One day, I saw my mother cry as she sat at her desk, the fountain pen trembling in her hands. I felt this agonizing twisting sensation in my chest, like my heart was a wet rag that was being squeezed and wrung too tightly. I timidly came over to my mother’s side and put my hand over hers to try and comfort her. She let out a heart-wrenching sob and told me,
“No matter how hard I try, I can’t see the ending.”
That night when my father finally came home, even later than usual, I told him what I had seen that day. Father’s brow furrowed in concern, but in the end he sent me away. For some time after that, I noticed that when my father came home from work, he would sit with my mother for a while. Sometimes he would pull her away from her desk, take her to listen to music or to join him in a game of chess, or sometimes to read together. Sometimes she would laugh with him, sometimes she would smile, and that seemed enough for him. He couldn’t seem to see how empty those laughs and smiles were. I tried to tell him – it’s not enough. But he would sigh and tell me he was doing his best.
One day, my mother didn’t come to sit at her desk. She instead wandered around the house, fixing this and cleaning that, scrubbing this and shining that. The next day her desk remained empty as she took to the kitchen and the garden. And the day after that, and the day after that. She sent away the help as she began to resign herself to a routine: wake up, clean the bedrooms, make breakfast, clean the bathrooms, make lunch, tend the garden, make dinner, clean the kitchen, go to bed. As I helped her with housework, I could see that the routine was just an empty distraction. Dust gathered on her desk, her pen, her manuscript, and I asked her why she didn’t return to the desk to write.
“No matter how hard I try, I can’t see the ending.” She told me.
Days went by like this until days became years. Each and every day, I watched this once passionate and amazing woman die just a little more. One day, I was cleaning her study, dusting her desk as my eyes fell upon that stack of red envelopes, unmoved throughout the years. There was a sharp and ferocious anger that rose up in me and I took the top envelope and looked at the address written neatly in the corner. I took paper from my mother’s desk and lifted up her fountain pen, pouring out my fury onto the paper to the person who had ruined everything. Who had taken the light from my mother’s eyes, who had stolen her passion away, who had slowly but surely killed her. Then, with hands that quivered with rage, I gave it to the postman to deliver.
Much to my astonishment, a plain white letter addressed to me came sometime later. I hid myself away and nervously opened the envelope. As I did, a deafening crash sounded from the kitchen. I rushed towards the sound, calling out for my mother who would be making lunch by this time. I got a strange, twisted whine in reply and I searched frantically for the source. My mother laid in a tangled mess upon the ground, her legs bent awkwardly beneath her and her head rolled to the side as a pool of red gathered and soaked into her hair. A horrified cry escaped from my lips as I rushed down to her side to take her hand. I called out to her again and squeezed her hand to let her know I was there, and though she couldn’t seem to turn her head to look at me, a hollow smile graced her lips as she whispered,
“Why couldn’t I just see the ending?”
Later they told me how it had happened. She had been standing on the stool to reach something too high in the cupboards. She’d simply lost balance and fell, cracking her head against the hard tile floor of the kitchen. They told me she had died right there on the floor as they tried desperately to save her life. Something that had become such a boring, normal, everyday part of the routine she had built for herself. Was that really true though? Was that what had really killed my mother?
Several weeks later as I gathered up some of my mother’s belongings, I happened again across that letter that I’d received the day my mother died. My fingers hesitated on the lip of the envelope for a long while before finally mustering up the courage to reveal its contents. I unfolded the parchment to reveal a single line written across the center of the page:
It wasn’t the ending I wanted.
A newfound wave of fury welled up from the pits of my stomach. It wasn’t the ending that they had wanted? This wasn’t the ending that her mother had wanted either – nor was it the ending that she deserved.
I watched my mother die. Not just in a pool of her own blood from an accident in the kitchen. I had watched my mother die day-by-day, the key bearer to her passion and potential having locked the door and tossed the key to the side. I had searched for that key every single day, I had tried to craft new keys to try and replace the lost one… I had tried to get my father help find the key, to help open that door.
But in the end, it was forever lost somewhere in those red envelopes.
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A Writer's Ravings
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