Lazarus

Thomas told me recently that I was like Lazarus last New Year’s Eve, rising from the ashes of a brief stomach situation all to make it to dinner that night for the promise of handmade pasta. He had underestimated a certain material I have in my cells that has yet to be named and almost certainly comes from Mom—I call it dark matter, a substance that makes up 85% of the universe but no one really knows what it is. My theory is that it’s 85% of everything, not just the universe. Let me explain.

Since I was little, I have lived in both fear and awe of Mom. She could cut me down with a quick glance and a quip of “well, yaknow” (and still can) and amaze me with her ability to power through just about anything that comes her way. There have been some trying years for her children; as the youngest, I watched closely and carefully to understand how she wielded such a pull amongst us all. No one, not even James, could disappear from her life. She simply would not let us, her love like an amorphous flowing glue that found its way into our lives to draw us back in to the fold. We obeyed this pull despite our attempts to evade it. If you know one of us well, you know this too—she is a force and, I would argue, made up of more dark matter than most.

At 13, Mom spent the better part of January learning and trying to make fish chowder and basic meals to keep her poor Irish family afloat in the wake of her mother’s death all to watch her Dad fall further into the grips of alcoholism. Deluded and drunk, her Dad once put all the family furniture outside and, as the years went on, the incidents got worse and worse. At 18, she found the strength to leave though not without regrets, particularly for leaving her youngest sibling behind, Peggy. Within 8 years, she had married Dad and started a family. Peggy came to live with them, then she began her own life, eventually doing god knows what for the CIA. Mom is apparently not the only one with dark matter. The rest is a history that continues to this day, I being the accident baby born 10 years after my four other siblings. We have learned, one by one and together, that Mom is a unique breed of humans whose cells should be studied. The events of the past week is all the proof I need that something more is at work here.

Around 3 am on Tuesday morning, I received a phone call. If you’re Irish, that triggers the question “who’s dead?” Mom was on the other line, calling from downstairs. “I don’t feel well at all.” she said. I don’t even remember descending the stairs, she was sitting in her chair struggling to breathe. She had had an upper respiratory virus earlier in the month that came back a couple days prior, things had clearly worsened quickly. She had already pressed her life alert button, “Mary do you need help?” they said. We had heard this line before, usually we just had to say “No! She hit it by accident!” This time, her answer was “yes, I can’t breathe.” When the EMTs arrived, they wheeled her out into the cold and took off. As I was still there with 3 kids, I called my brother (8 times) to get him up. Within the hour, Gary called and said “her blood pressure is dropping, the doctor suggested this could go south very quick. He asked if I had anyone to call so…” After I got off the phone with him, a text came in “blood pressure 59/47”. All I could say was “shit”, within minutes I had left the kids and headed in.

When I got to the hospital, Mom asked why I was there. “Oh you know just checking in.” ICU bound she was, pneumonia, sepsis, septic shock, flu. But she still had the wherewithal to ask the nurse if her shift was about to end and if I had coverage at school. Over the week and with blood pressure stabilizing meds alongside this and that, Mom is on her way back home as we speak. Mind you, she hasn’t gotten up on her own once since last week but I guess we’ll figure that out soon. I’m about to go find the walker, she’s going to love that.

“Tell Mom her new nickname is Lazarus” I told Jan the other day after dropping off her IPad and clean items at the hospital. Thomas’ nickname for me has officially been transferred, she’s the true Jesus miracle here. Through all the tumult of the week (and my own fighting off of some virus), I have thought a lot about this new nickname and exactly what it is that can make a human so stubbornly strong and unsinkable. I rest, again, on the concept of dark matter. Though it does not react with light, it does respond to gravity and holds our universe together in some weird way. An invisible force, without it we’d be floating like feathers throughout life. Though I cannot say with any certainty that I possess whatever that is, I can say with confidence that I admire it and hope, on some level, I do. Lazarus with the aid of that cosmic dark glue has risen again despite the odds, we should all be in awe.