A Brand, New Christmas Morning

As Todd watched his sister’s car join the swarm of Christmas Eve traffic on the boulevard, a tidal wave of desolation broke in his gut. Everyone was gone now – Dad, Kylee, and Simone. It was up to him to get Mom through the night.

He took a deep breath and turned slowly to face his enemy, Bledsoe Memorial Hospital. The building loomed six stories above him. He glared at it with a mixture of rage and terror.

Bledsoe was not a place of healing and safety. It was a vampire, suckling itself on Mom’s life forces – a breath of air here, a tube of blood there. And finally, only the cool gray cast of her body would remain.

Suddenly feeling an urgency to be with her, Todd hurried across the parking lot. He pulled the door of the hospital. It didn’t budge. It had opened a few minutes ago to disgorge him, his dad and his two sisters. What was wrong now?

Todd knocked on the plate glass door and peered inside. What was going on in there? Mom was dying. Why was this ghoulish building trying to keep him out?

Panic swept through him. He was Rambo, and Mom was in danger. He had to get to her before it was too late. No one else could save her. He hammered on the door until his knuckles ached. Then he slapped it with his palms.

Just before Todd began kicking, the door swung open. Todd stalked in, and the hospital’s warm, antiseptic breath engulfed him. A security guard closed the door behind him.

“I went out that door five minutes ago,” Todd growled, “but it was locked when I tried to get back in.”

The guard shrugged. “It always locks at 10:00 P.M. You can get out, but not back in. You’re supposed to use the emergency entrance.”

Todd ignored the guard’s mild reproof and took the elevator to the sixth floor. He had teased Mom at first about being on the penthouse floor. Now it was clear that the sixth was the last stop before the morgue. The sixth was the ward where discards were sent to be drained.

Meredith Bennett’s room was dim and hushed. Todd entered soundlessly and went to his mother’s bedside. He adjusted the nasal cannula on her face, willing the artificial breath to resurrect her cancer-ridden body.

“Mom, can you hear me?” he asked, holding her frail hand between his big, warm ones. He searched her deeply etched face for a sign that she had heard. “Mom, do you know how much I love you and need you?” he asked. But she was lost in a drug-induced, pain-saturated world where no one could join her. Gently, he put her hand back on the bed.

Hatred devoured Todd. He hated the illness that was destroying Mom from the inside out, the invisible killer that no one could conquer. He strode up and down the room, his pacing intensifying his ferment.

Suddenly, he paused in front of a large photograph of purple crocuses, blooming on barren ground. He clutched his hair. The picture infuriated him! He knew why “they” – the cunning administrators of this steel and glass vampire – had chosen it.

“They” believed it would resign moribund patients to their grisly fates. Mom was supposed to see the crocuses and realize that she was only a wrinkled, old bulb, waiting to burst into flower in a better life. A better life an infinity away from him!

Todd’s fury detonated. He smashed his fist into the smiling face of one of those smug crocuses. The crocus crumpled, and Todd’s fist saw stars. He flopped onto a vinyl lounge chair beside the bed and nursed his fingers.

It served “them” right that he had ruined their picture. No one had the right to try to persuade Mom to look forward to another life. She was loved and admired in this life. She needed to focus on regaining her strength and overcoming the cowardly cancer that held her prisoner.

While he was rubbing his hand, a large nurse glided into the room. “Good evening, Mr. Bennett,” she said softly with her eyes on Meredith. “How are you tonight?”

“How do you think I am?” Todd snarled.

The nurse turned to him with a start. “Why, you’re not Mr. Bennett! Excuse me.”

Her calm voice soothed him, and he apologized. “I’m sorry I barked at you. I’m Todd Bennett, and it’s my dad who’s usually here. But he’s so exhausted that my sisters Kylee and Simone were afraid he would be sick. They dragged him out of here to sleep in his own bed tonight. And I’m standing guard.”

The tall, plump woman nodded. “I’m Sylvia Juarez.” She moved around Meredith’s bed, checking connections, noting numbers, and observing her patient’s every sound and movement. With a tissue, she gently wiped the fragile face and whisked away a bit of thin discharge from Meredith’s nostrils. She readjusted some of the tubing and petted the white, wrinkled face.

“You’re a dear, beautiful woman, Merry Bennett,” she crooned, “and tonight is Christmas Eve. Your Todd is going to help me take care of you, so just relax. Before you know it, it’s going to be a brand, new Christmas morning. You’ll like that, won’t you?”

Todd watched his mother for a sign of understanding. He saw none. “You talk to her like she hears you,” he said.

Sylvia came around the bed and dropped into the chair beside his. “Who’s to say she doesn’t?”

He shrugged. “You know more about it than I do. You really seem to know your business. How’d you get so unlucky to have to work Christmas Eve?”

“Unlucky! Why, bless your heart, child. I don’t have to. I always request the graveyard shift on December 24th. The load is light. The hospital is warm. And I imagine that a Peace Angel is hovering nearby, supervising all our Christmas miracles.”

Todd’s eyes flashed. “Christmas miracles? What kind of miracles?”

Sylvia smiled at his eagerness. “Mostly little ones. A family that’s been feuding for decades might gather around a parent’s bed and forgive each other. A poor old man with no family might die with a smile on his face, and I imagine he has seen the Christ Child coming for him. Last year, an elderly insomniac woman made friends with an insomniac six-year-old on pediatrics, and he adopted her for his grandmother. Nothing big and exciting, but important to me.”

“I wish I could get a big, exciting miracle for Mom tonight,” Todd said. “I want her to be well more than anything else in the world.”

Sylvia nodded. She wished for his miracle too, but she said nothing. Sometimes silence gave more comfort than words.

Perhaps an Angel really was hovering in the background that night, cuing Sylvia, because when she finally spoke, she had the very words that would change Todd’s dirge into a carol. “What was the best Christmas present your mother ever gave you?” she asked.

For long moments, it seemed that Todd hadn’t heard her. Then his face became a dawn, radiating the barest glint of light before it blossomed into a sunrise of animation. “It wasn’t a Christmas gift. It was a graduation gift. And do you know what made it so good?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t graduate!” he said triumphantly. “I didn’t even graduate, but for the first time in my life, I got something bigger and better than my sisters Kylee and Simone. You should have seen their faces, puffed up like red balloons with mean little eyes, getting bigger and huffier, until I thought they would explode! Dad too. But Mom didn’t back down. She just let them huff and puff.”

“Tell me about it,” Sylvia said eagerly.

Todd nodded, and his countenance sobered, as he drifted back to the desperate day when he had come home heavy with evil tidings. “I can see Mom now, just like she looked then,” he said. “She was out in the flower bed, planting petunias – red, white, and blue petunias. But she didn’t just scatter them around willy-nilly. She was a landscape artist. When she got through, her plantings always made a picture or a design. I hated to disturb her.”

He sighed, and his spirit sank with every memory. “It was three days before my graduation, and I had just learned that I’d failed Civics. I wasn’t going to graduate with my friends. I would have to repeat the class in summer school. I had never been so mortified in my life.”

“That’s tough on a kid,” Sylvia agreed.

“Tough! It’s unbearable. And the worst part was the thought of my sisters Kylee and Simone smirking at me. Both of them graduated first in their classes. Both of them! Dad is an electrical engineering genius. I was the only dud in the family. I decided to kill myself.”

“Oh, Todd! How could you think of such a thing?”

“Think of it? I had the gun! Borrowed it from a friend. I told him I wanted it for target practice. It was true -my brain was the target. I stashed it in my room and went to tell Mom about my Civics grade. That was going to be my last courageous act before I took the coward’s way out.”

He paused, and Sylvia barely dared to breathe for fear of disturbing his thoughts. But he was far away, feeling the heat of the sun on his bare arms, smelling the rich humus Mom had mixed with the soil in the flower bed.

“Hi, Mom,” he had greeted her.

“Todd, my graduate!” she said exuberantly. “How does it feel to be on the verge of manhood?”

“I guess I wouldn’t know,” he answered with pathos oozing from his voice.

He studied the dirt smudges on her nose and forehead while she studied his face, trying to guess what was wrong. She was wearing jeans and her favorite red shirt. A red scarf held back her dark curls. She looked so fresh and carefree that he hated himself for coming. He should have left her alone with her patriotic petunias, gone out into the woods, and used the gun. Then she could have planted her petunias in peace.

Sylvia, listening to the tumble of words, closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. The poor child believed his suicide would bring peace. So ironic!

But there was no time to reflect. Todd was rushing on.

Finally, Mom had said, “What’s wrong, Todd?”

“I’m not going to graduate, Mom. I failed Civics.”

He watched that look come onto his mother’s face, the look of defeat and dejection that burned a hole in his heart and sang the old refrain, “Why can’t you be more like your sisters Kylee and Simone?”

“I tried, Mom,” he blurted before she could speak. “I tried hard, but I waited too late with my trying. It was no use. I’m just no good. Everybody knows I’m the worthless Bennett.”

Anger replaced despair on Mom’s face, and she began flipping dirt with short, sharp movements. She snapped a red petunia out of its pot and slapped it into a hole. She packed the dirt around it hard and reached for a blue flower.

Todd watched. She was so disgusted, she wouldn’t even talk to him. He might as well get it over with.

And then Mom hurled a white petunia in its pot against the house. She got up and stood in front of him with tears on her cheeks. She put her arms around him, transferring soil from her clothes to his. “Oh, Todd, my baby, what have we done to you? What have I done to you?” And then she was weeping.

He had stood in her embrace, his arms dangling at his sides, until she stepped back and glared at him. “I’ll have you know, Todd Bennett, that you are one of the finest men I ever met. It doesn’t matter when you graduate. Don’t you know that?”

“Yes ma’am,” he mumbled.

“Okay, here’s the plan. We’ll take a trip, just you and me. We’ll leave Friday morning and be long gone when the rest of your class is graduating. So where do you want to go?”

He stared at her. She’d flipped.

“Come on; spit it out!” she commanded. “Paris? Tokyo? London, Acapulco, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Honolulu…”

“Just you and me?” he asked, incredulous.

“Just you and me,” she said firmly. “Tell me where so I can get on it.”

He swallowed hard and said, “Acapulco.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Here.” She slapped her trowel into his hand. “Finish the petunias for me.”

“Where? Mom, I don’t know where you want them.”

She winked. “Doesn’t matter. Petunias don’t matter.”

And then she was gone. Todd collapsed in the flower bed and tried to repair the white petunia’s shattered root ball while he cried.

“Did you really go?” Sylvia asked in an awed voice.

“You bet we went,” said Todd. “Mom gave me seven days of her precious time, and I began to believe I was worth something, after all.”

“Did you tell her about the gun?”

He shook his head. “I was too embarrassed. Now I wish I had.”

“Maybe you just did,” Sylvia said, pointing at Meredith. Tears were cascading down her wrinkled face and a whisper of a blush tinged her cheeks.

Sylvia heaved herself up and left, as Todd sprang to the bed. “Oh, Mom,” he whispered, “I’m so glad you heard.” He gathered her, tubes and all, into his arms. “You gave me life twice, and I’ll always remember that. Mom, I love you so much.”

Meredith made no response. After a few minutes, Todd carefully placed her head back on the pillow and rearranged her tubes. He watched her for a long time with a peaceful expression on his face. Mom was warm. She could breathe. She had meds for pain. It wasn’t all he wanted for her, but it was the best he could hope for in her present condition.

He smiled and went to ask Sylvia for a pillow for himself.

Just before 6:00 the next morning, Sylvia stopped by Meredith’s room to say, “Merry Christmas.” The stillness alerted her. Meredith’s slow, gentle breathing had ceased altogether.

Sylvia noted the time and stepped around the bed to the young man asleep on the lounge chair nearby. “Todd, wake up,” she said, shaking his shoulder.

Todd opened his eyes and looked around groggily. He frowned and grunted, “Huh?”

“Todd, does your mom know Jesus? Is she born again?” Sylvia asked urgently.

Todd sat up and nodded. “Yeah…and it nearly broke her heart that she couldn’t go to the Christmas Eve service last night.”

“That explains it, then,” Sylvia said gently. “She decided to go Home for Christmas, Todd.”

Todd rose and bounded to his mother’s bed. As he gazed at her peaceful face with tears pouring down his own face, a stream of inner light filled his soul. This hospital wasn’t a ravening monster. This hospital was the passageway that had carried his mother into the arms of the God she had loved and served her whole life. This hospital had seen Meredith Bennett safely Home.

Todd stroked his mother’s cheek and kissed her forehead. When he turned away, fighting tears, he mustered a small smile for Sylvia. “Well, my mom certainly practices what she preaches,” he told her. “She always said folks should go home for Christmas.

                                                                            ***

Here are links to my blog indexes, which will make it quick and easy for you to find another post to read.
Blog Index – Lists blogs 1-35
Blog Index 2 – Lists blogs 36 to the latest post

Photo credit: Brett Sayles on pexels.com