12/22/12

Night Lights

By: Lee Thomas Penn

-Son of-

Thomas Lee Penn

            On Christmas Eve, I was driving to the hospital to take a miniature Christmas tree and some presents to my mother in room 403, West Wing. With each turn, the car would pull at the tiny ornaments on the tree, and I would grab hold of the top so that the whole thing wouldn’t topple over. I thought it would be nice to bring my mother a little something for Christmas, but I had a feeling that she wouldn’t take much notice – cancer was ravaging her stomach, and she was in a lot of pain.

            As I drove, the lights of streetlamps and oncoming headlights and glowing signs for fast food would grow larger and pass out of my field of vision, grow larger again, pass again. I always liked the way that light took on new dimensions at night, became more defined and shifted in a flux dependent on one’s perspective. Crystals – yellow, white, red, orange, sometimes blue – reaching up and reaching down and reaching out to keep the darkness at bay. Thinking about the lights always gave me a sense of safety, like being warm and dry inside my home with a cup of tea during a rainstorm…

            A sense of safety like I felt when my mom was driving me home one Christmas Eve. How old I was doesn’t matter. We were traveling home from visiting family, and it was past 11 o’clock at night when we left from their house.

            While my mother was driving, she kept trying to engage me in conversation. But it was late, and the car was whirring, and I was tired, and I was young. So, I tried to sleep and left the driving to her.

            But I couldn’t sleep. The lights from the streetlamps were rushing past, and if I tilted me head back and squinted my eyes just right, the crystalline lights from the lamps would reach down to me, and a light from inside of me would reach up to them. And the lights would blend, and the light in my chest was growing, collecting more light from the sources all around me. The light was happiness and safety and good fortune and love and the feeling that God was watching out for me. And I was making it mine.

            Only, the street lamps were always hurrying out of my field of vision, and I was afraid that, in the blending of the two lights, they were taking some of my own light with them. So, I would open my eyes just before the lamps were gone so that my own light was sucked back into my chest. And I felt that my light was safe. It became a kind of game to collect more light than I lost.

            But when I turned my squinted eyes toward my mother, her light didn’t go away. It reached out to mine, and ours formed together, and she continually gave her light to me. More and more, from this woman who was driving us home and had selflessly put aside her own desire to talk with her son so that I could pretend to be asleep. Her light never ran out.

            I remembered all of this while driving to room 403 of the West Wing of the hospital, and, even though I was driving, I decided to play the game again. I squinted my eyes and sucked in light.

It just made me sad. It made my little Christmas tree feel pathetic, not nearly good enough for this woman that had done so much for me. It made me feel helpless to save my mother from living a hazed life of painkillers and shitting continual cell death into a bedpan. It made me hate her for shouldering me with the responsibility to care for her, for making me stand by and watch her slowly die, for making me hate myself for hating her. It made the present time unbearable. It made me wish that I had stayed “awake” and talked with her that time long ago and during other times. It made me miss my mother because, in many ways, my mother was already gone. In a way, it was all too late.

I felt it all because all other sources of light – of happiness, safety, good fortune, love, God, what-have-you – were different and not my mother’s light.

The shear enormity of how much that whole situation sucked made my tears sting with anger and the lights from the street lamps lose their loose forms and shake and spread across my field of vision. When I arrived at the hospital, I set up the little tree and little presents and held my mother’s hand.

“I love you, Sweetie,” my mother croaked. And she gave a little cry of pain.

“I love you, too,” I said numbly.

And then I listened to her breathe for a while. I’m not sure for how long.

“Merry Christmas,” I said and kissed her on the forehead.

“Merry Christmas.”

Then I left.

When I got home, I called some friends and talked about everything and anything because I couldn’t stand to be alone with myself.