And where was her leg?
Gail saw again the stump, waving frantically. How odd that must have felt, to have the weight of a lower leg gone. She thought of her mother’s leg, intact, the last time she saw it, so thin, the veins tracing purple tributaries down mottled skin, leading to a foot with blackened toes, a black heel. Creeping up. Where would they put that leg?
Gail only remembered the number from the ICU, so she found her mother’s phone book and called the hospital’s general number. “I have an odd question for you,” she told the receptionist. Gail filled in the facts, then asked, “Can someone there tell me where my mother’s leg is?”
The receptionist stammered, then passed her off on a line of transfers, to the mental health department, the pastoral care, billing (the woman there was mortified, Gail could hear it in her voice) and finally to surgery. The nurse there passed her on to the supervisor and by then, Gail was in tears.
“Please,” she said. “Where is my mother’s leg?”
“All amputated limbs are incinerated,” the supervisor said. Her voice was quiet, steady.
“Right away?”
“Yes. The leg was taken care of on the day of your mother’s amputation. Long before she died.”
“Where? Was it incinerated there? Are the ashes from her leg there?” Gail trembled. She knew what the supervisor was going to say, but she hoped for something different.
“No, we send them out. They are incinerated outside of the hospital and then…disposed of.”
Thrown away.
Gail choked out a thank you, then hung up the phone. So that was that. There was no getting the leg back. “I’m sorry,” she said to her mother, to the urn. “I didn’t think. You weren’t supposed to die.”
The silence from the urn was as big as any from her mother, the silence Gail heard as a little girl when she was locked away in cupboards, in closets, in rope-tied boxes down the basement. Quickly, she got up and prepared to leave. She didn’t know why, but she turned on the television for her mother, setting it to a program she knew her mother watched. Then she left the apartment.
****
As Gail cleaned out her mother’s things, she left the urn sitting on the end table. At night, a light burned next to the couch and the television played; during the day, while Gail was there, she kept the apartment wrapped in silence. She took bereavement time from work and tried to accept her co-workers’ condolences. Many offered thoughts on how hard it was to lose a mother. And Gail wondered what that must be like. To lose someone who loved, rather than hurt. And someone she could have loved back, which she did, but with a love that wasn’t mixed with pain and with hate.
Most of her mother’s things went out the door, either to the trash or to Goodwill. Gail didn’t want to keep anything until she came across her mother’s old white sweater, draped over a desk chair. Her mother wore that ratty thing for as long as Gail could remember. She never wore it when she went out…it stayed behind on the desk chair, but whenever Gail’s mother was home, the sweater was around her shoulders. Even in the heat of July. Gail’s mother was always cold.
She must have put the sweater there on her way out the door to the hospital. Gail went to put it in the trash bag, but then stopped. The sweater was soft in that way that only threadbare things can be, age removing any stiffness from the thread or the yarn. Gail touched it to her cheek, then breathed in.
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