Part 10When Emily was seven, Frank had a massive brain hemorrhage. By that time, Grandfather had passed away, and we were living in his old house down the road from Frank’s parents. But on this evening, Emily and I were fixing dinner with Frank’s mom in her kitchen when the men came in for the day. Frank said that he had a bad headache and wanted to lie down upstairs in his old room. At dinner time, I looked for Emily to send her upstairs to get her daddy, but she had run outside to play with a neighbor’s child. I found Frank lying strangely unconscious, clearly not just asleep, curled up on his side. He had vomited on the pillow next to him.
He lay in a coma in the hospital for five weeks. Some days I would find him in the fetal position, his fists clinched like paws and drawn up to his neck, but when the nurses came in to change his bedclothes, they would always help him onto his back and lay his arms beside him so that he looked like he was sleeping. On the seventh day after the hemorrhage, he sprang into violent activity while I was sitting next to his bed. His eyes opened wide, his brown irises razor-thin like a madman’s. He screamed and sobbed as though he were being tortured, or worse, utterly forsaken. He cried out just one word that I could understand, “Mama! Mama!” deepening my horror that he could not perceive anything now but total abandonment.
to be continued
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