Always

“Always.” The words were out of my mouth before I really knew why. I’d never answered that question that way and I’m not sure why I did that day. The typical response was to clam up so that I wasn’t tempted to break down into tears. Perhaps there was something to this healing process after all.
Any time someone would ask me about my mom, I had to tread carefully lest I poke the bundle of emotions that has nested at the back of my mind since that day twelve years ago. So when my grandmother had asked me if my mom was with me, it was a surprise to me to hear the word ‘always’ come from my mouth. What had prompted me to say that? She hadn’t actually meant my mother anyway, she had been referring to my step-mother. It was difficult for her to refer to my step-mother by that title since she was also her daughter.
A few years after my mother passed, my father had married her sister. It was a running joke that we, my siblings and I, were our own cousins. It has caused a lot of odd looks, as I’m sure you are sporting right now thinking of the logistics of it. The important part is, my dad is happy, that’s all anyone needs to understand about the situation.
I guess I should go back to the beginning and explain why it is the question and answer so vex me.
Twelve years ago, my mother died. A massive heart attack hit her while she slept on the night of February 11th, 2002. Her heart had been damaged by a previous attack that had gone unnoticed so the attack on the night of the 11th was worse than it could have been, had she been on treatment for her heart.
The part of the story that caused the emotions though is what happened after she had the attack.
I had just gotten home from work, a thankless job stocking shelves at the K-mart in Ionia. Ordinarily, when I work the late shift, I come home and go straight to bed and that night was no different. I didn’t even bother changing out of my work clothes before sprawling on my bed to sleep. Sometime around 11, I was woke by the dog licking my face. She was a good dog and was trying to help. My dad was shouting for me from his basement bedroom. At first I thought it was the phone, see I had a friend that often drunk dialed me at all hours. My first response was to pick up the phone, but there was no one there.
My dad continued to shout, so I went to the stairs and shouted back “What?”
“I need you!” He shouted back.
Panic was immediate for me. My father had never called for me like that.
I ran down the stairs and came into a scene that no one should ever have to go through. My father was desperately shaking my mother trying to get her to respond. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling but she wasn’t breathing.
I grabbed the phone and called 911. The dispatcher picked up and started to give me the steps that I already knew but was too panicked to do.
“Is she breathing?” He asked.
“No!” I screamed. “And she doesn’t have a pulse!”
“Ok, do you know CPR?” The dispatcher asked.
Of course I knew CPR, why didn’t I think of that? I had taken CPR classes every year for the previous 10 years. I smiled through the classes, and often joked around with my classmates. I wasn’t smiling now. “I know CPR.” I managed.
“Is she still in the bed?” The dispatcher asked me. “You have to put her on a hard surface to do CPR.” He told me.
“Dad! We have to move her to the floor!” I dropped the phone and grabbed my mom’s ankles. I lifted with all I had, but we just barely got her down off the bed without dropping her straight. She was heavier than I would have thought, but no one really knows what it is like to lift a person when they aren’t helping.
Once we had her down I started compressions. One, two, three, four, five, “Dad! Two breaths!” I screamed at him. Shouldn’t he know that?
The phone! I grabbed at the phone and put it back to my ear. The dispatcher was hollering for me. “Mr. Bennett, are you there!?”
“I’m here”, I replied. “We’re doing CPR. Where’s the ambulance?” My heart was racing, it wasn’t like the TV shows at all. Shouldn’t she be coughing now, complaining about me sitting on her?
“The ambulance is coming.” The dispatcher told me.
I dropped the phone again as I continued my compressions. Dad left to wake my brother and send him to the end of the driveway, it was a ¼ mile long and really difficult to find if you hadn’t been there before. Since I was alone, I was doing the whole CPR thing. Now it was fifteen compressions and two breaths. Fifteen and two, fifteen and two. “Come on Mom!” I shouted at her open eyes.
Still no coughing, no complaints. I grabbed the phone again. Surely it must have been hours since I called, where was the damn ambulance?
“They are coming down the driveway now.” The dispatcher told me. I hadn’t realized I had asked. “It’s a long driveway.”
Fifteen and two. Three people come into the room, the big guy throws my parents bed out of the way and starts unpacking a portable defibrillator. The two women with him move over to me and I throw myself out of the way. They are the professionals, they can do this better than me.
But it didn’t matter. Mom was gone. Her heart was in ventricular fibrillation and wouldn’t restart.
There was a cop there now. He had to be there to make sure there was no foul play but his presence did little for me.
My brother was there too. He sat in the chair next to me and didn’t really look awake. How much did he know?
“Whoa!” Someone shouts from the other room. “Do it again, I think we have her!” The voice was excited, but somehow felt wrong to me.
Then they were leaving. Taking mom out the basement door to the ambulance, but she wasn’t breathing and they weren’t doing CPR. Seeing my face, one of the paramedics rushes over and pretends to do compressions, but I’ve already seen it. They rush out the door like there is still something to be done, but they are really just trying to save us the pain of having the coroner come to our house.
We run up to the garage, hope still running through my dad that they are saving her. The cop stops us. “Drive careful. There will be grief counselors at the hospital when you get there.”
Why would we need grief counselors? My dad isn’t listening. He follows close to the ambulance along the icy roads all the way to town.
He rushes into the ER, blowing right by a rather aggravated receptionist who screams at him to come back. I head her off, “They just brought my mom in by ambulance.”
“She needs to be registered.” The woman tells me, still trying to get my dad to stop.
“I’ll handle it,” and I do. A presence of mind had set in for me, how I was calm I don’t know. I wish I could be that calm all the time. I register her, give them her birthdate approximate weight, height and insurance status. I couldn’t remember to get her flowers for her birthday most years, but I rattle it off like I could never forget. Finally the receptionist lets me go.
I find dad being confined to a room by a large security guard. Apparently they had caught him in the ER and forced him here. I sit down with him, my brother is parking the car still. How could that be? Hadn’t we been here for an hour? The doctor comes in and says it flatly, “Mr. Bennett, I’m sorry but your wife is gone.”
“Can I see her?” My dad manages and leaves with the doctor to see my mom. I don’t go with him, my brother has just come in from parking the car.
I tell my brother that our mom is gone. He is stronger than I am and doesn’t cry. He goes back with my dad, I still don’t go. In hindsight, things may have been easier if I had.
I instead flee the scene. I didn’t want anyone else to see me. A grief counselor tries to stop me, but she is just a tiny woman and really doesn’t want to be in my way.

A lot of things happen from that point on. We spent a few nights at my grandmother’s house, something I had never done. I was always envious of my cousins because they would often spend the night there since they lived much farther away than we did. When I finally got my chance, it wasn’t what I had always imagined.
Relatives came and went for the days we were there, and on Wednesday Grandma sends us home. “A shower and a shave will make you feel better.” She tells us. I don’t believe her.
The following weekend we all sit in a room and talk about mom, our wake with family and close friends. The current reverend from the church is there, though no one really wants him to be. He finds it necessary to bring up playing the fiddle to one of my mother’s friends and proceeds to tell him that he only ‘tries’ to play it. Why that particular moment sticks I don’t know, but it stuck and caused me to revile the man.
The funeral is pushed out an extra week for me. See my twentieth birthday was the 22nd, 11 days after mom passed. Dad doesn’t want to make my birthday suck forever by having the funeral right after. What he doesn’t realize is that it’s already tainted and will never be the same. To this day I still don’t celebrate it like I used to. My last conversation with my mother was about my birthday. She was on the phone with someone talking about the Friday that it fell on, turning them down for whatever they were inviting her to since it was my birthday. She teased me, “You act like it is an important birthday or something.” She knew it was my 20th, and was just giving me hell. I still don’t know what she had planned for the night. Whatever it was, she hadn’t shared it with anyone. It was probably just taking me to dinner, but she would have done something.
Birthday comes and goes, funeral is over. I don’t go back to see the headstone. I don’t return to that spot for almost ten years. I try to go more often now, but it is still hard and pokes that bundle of emotions I was talking about with a very large stick.
See I have what the doctor’s call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. My life is about finding ways to minimize my stress so that I don’t end up back in that basement. I was controlling it for about ten years before I finally snapped and had to take a medical leave from work. At least I thought I was handling it.
I also have some pretty serious issues with anger, always had a temper. This has caused rifts in my new family, driving me away from my step-son and my wife. I’m working to fix this, but I still have occasional bouts. I’m working on it, and eventually may even be able to say I’ve fixed it.
If I let me stress get to me too much, I’ll snap and find myself in that flower-wallpapered bedroom screaming at my mom. Others with PTSD know what I’m talking about. You never really leave that place, it’s always there at the back of your mind ready to be called up. For some it is the horrors of war, for me it is that night. With striking detail I can describe that room, the moments I was there and what happened for hours after that.
It isn’t the only memory that is stuck with me, but it is the worst. I have others that I can call up with detail.
For me it was failure that stuck it there. I hate to fail, no matter in what. To me, I failed to save my mom. For twelve years I thought I failed, despite the fact that even with a defibrillator her heart couldn’t be restarted. No, I failed. That’s what I told myself over and over again. Eventually I admitted that I didn’t fail, but the damage was done. Failure for me is now just a heartbeat from sending me over that cliff and back into the abyss of PTSD. So, on top of my regular stressors, I struggle to do everything perfect. This struggle creates even more stress and often sets off a temper-tantrum. I’m still working on it.
I also avoid anything to do with CPR. When my first son was born early, the hospital required that I sit through an infant CPR class. It was horrible. The others did what they could to learn the class, I sat quietly trying not to envision myself sitting over my brand new baby boy in the same way that I did for my mom. Every parent has those nightmares, but I had real memories to fuel them. I didn’t sleep for a month after we brought him home. No, I got up every 20 minutes to make sure he was still breathing. Thankfully, Morgan sleeps like a bear in winter so he didn’t mind daddy poking him every 20 minutes.
On life rolls, but part of me is still stuck in 2002. I will likely never have that part back, but I will do what I can to go on without it.
“Is mom with you?” Grandma asks.
“Always.” I tell her.