venting

Venting

My mother's departure from reality was a plodding, ill-fated course which took eleven months to reach the summit of its frightening precipice. It was less than one year ago when she suffered the stroke, and Dr. Artigo, a life-long family physician, diagnosed her with acute dementia in September of 2008, when she was still living at Sunny Meadows, a moderately priced retirement community.

She was relatively content there; she had three square meals a day, and was free to busy herself with various arts and crafts projects she diligently worked on but never quite finished. For six pleasant months after the stroke my mother's room at Sunny Meadows had steadily accumulated a myriad of unfinished beaded jewelry—colorful necklaces and bracelets and earrings, all of which didn't follow any specific color-pattern, and were piled on her coffee table in a great mound.

“I forgot the pattern I was going for when I made that,” she'd tell me frequently, picking up a tray of half-strung necklaces and placing them on the nightstand beside the sofa and out of sight. “I can never remember what I originally had in mind. It gets so frustrating, forgetting stupid things like this.”

Her memory was the first to be affected from the dementia; she had problems remembering certain events: the last time I saw her, birthdays of close friends and family, major holidays. Concentration was difficult, so on my visits with her I did my best to try and help her remember her original idea for the beaded jewelry, or offer her suggestions as to what pattern may look interesting, but she never cared much. “It doesn't matter,” she said, waving my suggestions out the air with an indifferent hand. “If I can't remember my ideas, they must not have been very good in the first place.”

One day while visiting her on a cold, gray February afternoon, after an hour of wasted encouragement, I was perusing through her drawings on the dining table (she'd always had a great talent in this area) when I came upon a very peculiar one, a colored-pencil sketching that I'd later remember forever with terrifying, vivid clarity; the mere recollection of that image would cause my body to break out in an icy-cold horripilation. She had drawn a ghastly portrait of a haggard old woman. Her skin had a decayed quality, dark green in color like an avocado that's been left out for too long, and her hair was a black, tangled mess matted against her head. The eyes were dark chasms on her face. This drawing, like all her projects, remained incomplete; the head floated on the white page with no body, staring malevolently at the viewer.

“What's this?” I asked. The drawing echoed a disturbing mood, it was by far her best piece of work I could ever recall seeing.

“Oh that,” she said, snatching the drawing from my fingers. “That's, you know, it is just something I did. Don't mind it. I don't know why I even drew that ugly picture.”

“Who is it suppose to be?”

“No one in particular. I had a nightmare the other night. I saw her face in the dream.”

“Who is she?”

“I couldn't tell you.”

And that was all she would say about the strange drawing. Despite my unremitting questions, she simply refused to speak any more of it. Neither of us knew then that was to be her last drawing.

The real problems with my mother began in late September when I was roused in the dead of night by the ringing of my cell phone. It was the manager of Sunny Meadows, and she informed me that there had been an incident with my mother. A nurse who had been on call that night was finishing up with a resident who was stricken with the flu, and as she was leaving the resident's room, she heard a good deal of noise coming from the far end of the long hallway where my mother's room was. There was shouting and then a loud noise, the sound of something crashing. The nurse grew concerned as she moved closer—the muffled clamoring on the other side of my mother's door becoming louder—to the end of the hallway, and stopped at room 612.

What happened next I could hardly believe, and as the manager disclosed the unnerving details, I listened with an incredulous ear; I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My mother was a sweet, compassionate soul, a gentle spirit, but what the manager was describing on the phone conjured up in my mind the image of a psychotic, knife-wielding maniac. According to the nurse's accounts, she had tried knocking on my mother's door several times, each knock fading beneath the noise emitting from the other side of the door. No one answered. Fearing for the safety of the resident inside, the nurse unlocked the door and entered. The lights were off, and the room was very dark. She called out into the black void.

“Hell-o?”

Her voice interacted with the dark room, and the noise in the room ceased under a heavy silence. Her eyes still not adjusting to the darkness, the nurse felt for a light switch on the wall to her right and flicked it on—and not a moment too soon, because standing before her was my mother, her eyes wide and white with terror, panting heavily, a large kitchen knife clutched firmly in her bloody hand.

But this wasn't the part of the story I had a difficult time believing, that came next. The nurse, after safely removing the knife from my mother (“Give me the knife, Ma'am.”), the nurse alerted the staff and asked my mother what had happened in the room—a lamp had been knocked over, the window shutteres were askew, and all along the living room walls were tiny black slits which were the same width as the blade of a kitchen knife. The nurse said my mother was speaking in a quavering voice, about a strange greenish woman who gave off a terrible odor (“It was horrible—can't you smell it?”); this green lady then became violent, and attacked my mother—that was why she had grabbed the big kitchen knife, to defend herself.

I interrupted the manager and asked if my mother had been hurt, and the manager assured me she had received several minor injuries but that they were only superficial, a bump on the head and a scrape on the right elbow. I relaxed a little. While all this was coming as an enormous shock to me, the greatest shock of all, however, occurred when the manager told me they believed the entire unfortunate incident was a hallucination on my mother's behalf.

I was stunned, but having personally witnessed my mother's diminishing grip on reality first-hand, I was not entirely taken aback.

A week later I received an eviction letter in the mail from Sunny Meadows, along with a written statement by three doctors, all of whom believed my mother to be unfit for residence there. I didn't challenge the letters in any way, didn't go for a second opinion, but instead quietly acquiesced. A month later the last of my mother's belongings were loaded into the back of a rental truck, and shipped to my address. She was to stay with me in my house located in the lolling, verdant hills of New Haven, a small, nearly non-existent coastal town nestled just south of the California-Oregon borderline.

The first week went smoothly. My mother acclimated well to the change of scenery. She accompanied me in my home office as a secretary answering phone calls, and my wife, Debra, an elementary school teacher, enlisted her help grading homework assignments in the evenings. This was good for us because we could keep a close watch on her, and it was good for my mother because it gave her something to occupy her time with. Upon first hearing about the incident with my mother at Sunny Meadows, Debra and I had both argued that the most difficult aspect of having her under our roof was going to be the inordinate supervision we feared she'd require.

But this wasn't the case. She was very mild-mannered, and that was a welcomed surprise for the both of us. As the days began to darken earlier and the nights grew colder with the inexorable approach of Winter, life at our quiet mountain home couldn't have been better. The arrangement with my mother proved to be much more successful than Debra and I could've imagined, and I was beginning to believe that the incident at Sunny Meadows was a strange fit of some sort that came naturally with old age, and that the nurse at Sunny Meadows had embellishing the details about my mother's attack.

On the night of October eighteenth, my confidence in this explanation was rattled as things changed for the worst. I was working late in the study that night. It was well after eleven o'clock, and sleep was collecting on my eyelids, making it difficult for me to keep them open. Deciding the focus on my work would continue to deteriorate as the minutes passed, I shut off the light in the study and ascended the stairs for the bedroom, whereupon, stopping to listen, I heard a door creak open downstairs followed by the shuffling of slippers on the hardwood floor. I peered over the ledge of the stair rail, my eyes straining against the darkness. The shuffling slippers erratically scampered about down there, changing directions in a desultory manner, shuffling back and forth, pausing, then back and forth again.

I sighed and went back down the staircase. The shuffling sound stopped, seeming to take notice of my presence.

“Byron?” my mother's voice called out. “Byron, is that you?”

I flicked on the nearest light switch, and the darkness retreated. My mother was standing in the living room, wearing her red bathrobe and matching red slippers, crouched forward at the waist, as if she were in predatorial pursuit of something. “Not Byron, Mom,” I said. “Dad died eleven years ago.”

“I thought I heard him.”

“What are you doing out here? You're supposed to be in your bedroom after dinner. That's what we agreed on.”

“I understand that,” she said tentatively, “But I heard a curious… Something very curious… In the ventilation.” She lifted her eyes to the ventilation grill above the pantry door. “Did you hear it too? Is that why you're out here?”

“I heard you while on my way to bed, which is where you need to be going.”

An affronted look came into her face.

“How do you expect me to sleep?” she asked venomously. “I can't possibly sleep with her up there, making all that racket, wriggling and bumping her way through the vents. I tell you, it's maddening. And the wailing—oh it's so terrible! The way she accuses me of things. Horrible, horrible things.”

“I haven't heard anything, Mom. Only you are hearing things.”

“Shh, shh—listen.” She tilted her head sideways, listening attentively, standing poised as if she expected the sound to break the silence at any given moment. But no sound came. “Do you hear it?”

Losing patience, I told her I didn't.

Her brow wrinkled in befuddlement. “Neither do I. So strange though, because I just heard her a minute ago, slithering about in the vents before you turned on the lights.” She looked at me in a way that suggested I had the answers, and that she was waiting for me to give them to her.

Curiosity crept into my head as she was staring at me, and a sort of morbid fascination came over me. I wondered what was going through her mind, how she perceived the world around her, and I couldn't help but wonder what she was seeing, this manifestation in the house that haunted her and no one else. Before dinner I remembered watching her take the 250 mg tablet of Haldol, the anti-psychotic Dr. Artigo prescribed for her. It was having no effect, so it was with a great reticence (I didn't necessarily want to play into her delirium) that I asked her about the personal pronoun that had arrested her imagination, the phantom in the ventilation shafts, this she my mother kept referring to.

“Who is up in the vents?” I asked. Her faded blue eyes met mine, and I sensed she wanted to look up at the ventilation shaft, but for some reason she was restraining herself from doing so. With a shaky hand she held my arm, leaned in close, and said gravely—

“She's a liar, is what she is. Don't believe anything her ugly green face says.”

The sketching of that heinous face I saw several weeks back at my mother's room at Sunny meadows suddenly came to mind, and an eerie cold descended upon the room. Humorously enough, I then found myself deliberately holding eye contact with my mother, resisting the urge to let my gaze wonder up to the ventilation grill out of the puerile fear of seeing that heinous face floating there in the blackness in between the white bars of the ventilation grill. I tried to conceal my expression, to let my mother know her words hadn't penetrated me, but the way she was looking at me, subtlety nodding, hinted that a quiet understanding had passed through us. Before I could say anything to refute this, she was already shuffling around the corner and down the hallway to her bedroom. I heard her bedroom door shut.

Be it the powers of my lively imagination, or the detrimental side effects of successfully empathizing with what my mother had been experiencing, I was stand there in the kitchen by myself, opposite the ventilation grill, and there was an overpowering desire to flee. The kitchen had become uncomfortable, and I didn't like standing there, the sensation of being exposed. The terrible green face still loomed in my mind, shrouded in the darkness, leering at me from behind the white bars of the grill. Turning off the lights, I left the kitchen before my imagination became completely unhinged.

The following morning at breakfast, my mother was unable to recall any of the events of the previous night, which pleased both my wife and I. She was confused about the date, but her confusion cleared after she read the date on the calendar hanging beside the fridge. My wife and I prayed especially hard after that morning, hoping God would put an end to her nighttime delirium, hoping her mind would find rest. But a part of me doubted whether God was listening.

The next few nights all followed the same pattern. Once the house went dark and slept, my mother roamed the quiet floors, following that strange sound in the ceiling only she could hear, the wailing echoes in the vents. And I would have to convince her that nothing was there, which, of course, never got any easier for me; it was unsettling to see her like that, delusional and helpless, chasing down phantoms in the night, phantoms that thumped through the vents overhead.

There was no successful way of dealing with her hallucinations; outright denial of them made her boisterous and defensive.

“For the last time, no one is up there!”

“There is! There is! She doing this on purpose, tormenting me like this! She won't let the past go! She drives me so mad sometimes I want to kill myself so I can have peace from her!”

“She's all in your head, Mom! Why do you think you're on all this medicine?”

“You are trying to sedate me! Keep me listless in my old age!”

“Oh, for heaven's sake.”

I read in scientific journals that going along with the hallucinations often times helped, but this only encouraged her.

“It's like I told you when you were younger about your Grandma,” she told me. “She saw all sorts of things in her old age, and do you remember what I told you?”

“No.”

“God has our check-out date preplanned. And the closer we get to that date, the veils that separate us from the afterlife begin to thin, and we begin to see things we haven't seen our entire lives but have nonetheless been there the entire time. That's why this crazy amount medicine you're giving me is ridiculous. I don't have dementia. The veils are thinning around me. What I'm seeing can't be helped.”

“So you're close to dying? Is that right?”

“Well, I am ninety-two years old—”

“Eighty-eight.”

“That's what I said, eighty-eight.”

Seeing no decline in the persistent frequency of her hallucinations, I called Dr. Artigo for a professional opinion, whereupon he informed me that I should increase the dosage of her Haldol. He told me that if her condition failed to respond to the medicine, admittance into a psychiatric hospital was the next course of action.

Naturally, I didn't want to place her in such a place, these were her golden years after all, yet at the rate her presence of mind was worsening, confusing me for my father and her inability to retain information, from the order of the days of the week, to what cabinet the dinner plates were in, to the door down the hall where the bathroom could be found, a part of me surmised she would inevitably find herself there. Basic facts ran down the walls of her consciousness and dripped into the black watery abysss. All she seemed to retain with any clarity was the green lady in the ceiling. Somehow, in spite of this, I managed to cling to a shred of optimism, an obstinate belief that increasing her dosage of Haldol would, in some way, benefit her. She would get better.

And then, in a move so typical and expectant of life, things turned for the worse.

On the night of November seventeenth, sometime after midnight, the little optimism I stubbornly clung to was ripped from my hands as I called emergency services and alerted them that my mother had collapsed on the floor and wasn't breathing.

While I'll now recall the incidents to the best of my abilities, with honesty and preciseness, it should be important to note that this is merely my perspective of the incidents that unfolded in the hours before my mother's death. I am not claiming what I saw to be an unequivocal truth, and understand, that upon closer securitization, there's a chance the events could be attributed to a myriad of explanations, be it from science or medicine, but, admittedly, I am neither a scientist nor doctor; I am but an observer of an event, an eyewitness to something which I have not an explanation.

It is from the necessity of purging the incident from my mind and to this page, in an attempt to bring me, God willing, relief from the nightmares which have kept me from sleeping ever since that horrible night of my mother's passing, for I haven't told a soul what happened the moments prior to her death—not even my own wife. As popular as it is to proclaim you don't care what others think, this is a statement I have never been able to say outwardly, a statement I have no credence in. I am not indifferent to the thoughts of others; on the contrary, I care deeply what they think, especially of me. I don't want people to look at me and question my sanity, especially my wife. I don't want anyone thinking differently of me, which is why I am writing this here. This is a safe haven for me, free of ridicule and criticism, to confess this secret that's been a burden on me.

So it is with a heavy hand and a pained heart that I recall that night, over two weeks ago…

I had just returned from the pharmacy with another month's supply of my mother's medication. Debra was preparing halibut and rice pilaf for dinner. My mother, to the delight of the delicious scent in the air, was in the middle of a story she was telling Debra, something about chicken and how Byron used to prepare it.

“He had picked up this recipe long before he and I were married. He was living in Shaver Lake at the time. We weren't dating, but I was friends with the girl he was dating. I never liked her. He would go out on the lake and catch these fish and put them in this bucket. She always complained about the smell, going on and on about how it made her nauseous.”

“Was that why he broke up with her?” Debra asked, smiling.

“No, she died in a boating accident.”

“Oh, that's awful.”

“Yes, it was.”

Over dinner my mother was very talkative and cheerful, commenting on how brilliant the meal was, and provided entertaining stories about herself from her younger years. For the first time in a long while, she looked and sounded healthy, in mind, body and spirit.

The medication was working, I remember telling myself. The medication was working well. After dinner I showered and dressed for bed. Debra and I were impressed—elated—with how well my mother was responding to the increase in Haldol. We then drifted off to sleep, liberated from worry and fear.

Sometime past midnight I heard a noise coming from the kitchen, a clanging noise. It sounded like something had fallen. I sat up in bed, listening, trying to ignore the worry and fear returning, taking up residence in the pit of my stomach and hardening there.

Hurrying down the stairs, a lump in my stomach, I made my way for where I heard the sound, praying to God my mother wasn't there but in bed sleeping peacefully, improving, becoming once again the mother I missed so dearly, the mother I could talk to about anything, the mother who had seemed dead for so long.

The light switch flicked on, darkness scattered.

My stomach plunged to my loins. “What aren't you in bed, Mom?”

She was by the pantry, her gray head cocked upwards, staring at the ventilation grill above the pantry door.

“She stopped here all of a sudden. I don't know why. She was scampering about back and forth as usual, then she stopped.” She was speaking very fast. “I think she's been stuck up there, that's why she is crawling all the time. She's trying to get out and she can't. Can you see her in there?”

“No, I can't see anything,” I said despondently. The medication had no effect. She was erratic and unfocused, her eyes twitching about. Tomorrow I would have to call Dr. Artigo and ask him which psychiatric hospital my mother would be admitted too. “You need to be going to bed, Mom.” She moved in such a rapid and jerky way it was like watching an actress in a black and white silent film.

“But you can hear her right, that noise she makes? Oh, of course you can hear it—she's right there after all. Watching us right now. She makes weird noises doesn't she, up in the vent?”

I let out a heavy sigh. “No, Mom. I can't hear anything—” Then it dawned on me—perhaps out of habit from continually telling her no—that I was lying. Up in the vent where she was pointing I heard it, a melancholic voice, drawling on in inaudible wails. It was eerie and seductive, almost hypotic. Like a flame that transfixes the eye, so did the wails transfix my ears.

“What is that?”

“That's her, the one I've been talking about—the one who's been keeping me up every night.” My mother slowly stepped back a few feet, stopping abreast with me. Taking my elbow, she said, “I don't want her to come down. From up in the vents, I don't want her to come down. She's been trying to get out of there for a few days now. She's been telling me these last few nights she's coming down, which is why I am up all the time. I'm checking the vents, making sure the grills are still on—so there's no way she can get down. But she say she's coming down, so she must have found another way. Maybe one is loose. We need to find it so we block it off somehow. With a board, we can nail it on.”

Logic shoved its way through my fear, and I tried to make sense of what we were hearing. I thought for a moment. “Air passes through these vents,” I said, more to myself than to my mother. “Makes all kinds of noise, the air. Think of the errie whistle air can make passing through a window that's cracked open. That's what is making the noise.”

She shook her head. “I've never heard air speak. Air doesn't speak in hushed whispers.” Her eyes didn't leave the ventilation grill.

She was invulnerable to my explanation, which, I thought, made a good deal of sense. It was only air after all. I remembered back to a summer day not long ago. The mercury was boiling, and the air conditioning had been running endlessly. It had made some fairly bizarre noises, noises I had never heard before, kind of like now.

“It's not the heat,” she said.

My air hypothesis failed to stand up against what happened next. A distinctive wail came from the vent, then molded and took the shape of words. It was vague, but I thought I heard the words, left me. I wouldn't have believed it were it not for my mother. I turned to her, and her gray eyes were fixed on me, her lower lip quavering.

“Don't let her take me,” she said in a shaky voice. “Don't let her. I don't want her coming down, I don't want her coming down. She still holds a grudge against me. Says I let her drown, but it's not true.” The fear radiating off my mother was contagious, and I found myself tethered where I stood. The room had gone deathly silent, the wailing calmed. My pulse drummed in my head. We both looked over at the ventilation grill, listening.

Thud.

Our attention was on the pantry door; the sound came from behind it Then it went quiet. I wanted to lunge forward and barricade the door, but I knew there was nothing behind it, so I restrained myself. My mother had a similar thought because she stepped forward, hand outstretched, reaching for the door.

There was a loud clicking sound at the door. My mother dropped her hand and stepped back. The sound clicked again, and I knew why. I had placed child safety latches on the door prior to my mother moving in. Debra and I didn't want her rummaging through the cabinets at night. It was a two-way latch catch. The door could only open an inch before the tiny arm hit the plastic catch.

My heart leapt up into my throat. Was the door trying to open? I couldn't see any movement. The door wasn't opening. It had to be something else.

Feeling childish for how afraid I was, I swallowed a deep breath of air and stepped forward to the door. I was going to put an end to this ridiculous hysteria. My mom was heavily medicated; she was eighty-eight years old. Her mind was deteriorating faster than her body. All the what-if questions had gotten the best of me. My imagination had gotten the better of me, twice. As I narrowed in on the pantry door, I resolved to put an end to this spectacle.

CLUNK.

The pantry door collided against the plastic catch, jarring me, sending a thunderclap of fear through my body. The door moved; I saw it. I saw it jerk open, hit the plastic catch, and shut again. I threw a fearful glance at my mother, who looked petrified.

“Mom, go to your bedroom.”

CLUNK.

“ Get to your room.”

CLUNK—CLUNK—CLUNK.

When I turned back to the pantry door, not having any idea what to do, I saw that the pantry door fully opened, gaping there like an open mouth. It was too dark inside to see the contents of the cupboard except for the vague outline of the white shelves. And a shape, a black mass of shadow.

“What in God's name?”

A sudden sound broke out, a strange fast-moving sound. It was like the sound of a boy crawling across the floor on all fours, fast and crashing. The sound charged out of the dark pantry, coming at me. In my mind I pictured the sketching of the green lady, that terrible head, creeping at me on all its discolored, rotted limbs like an insect. A gust of icy-cold wind past through me, a sickening putrid smell hit my nostrils. The strength left my legs, and I staggered a moment before falling… falling… towards the wooden floor. I closed my eyes before the second before impact.

I hit the ground, and there was a splashing sound. I was enveloped in cold water. I opened my eyes. Hundreds of little bubbles floated past my face and over my head. I couldn't breath, and my lungs burned as if I was drowning. How long had I been underwater? Panic-stricken, I kicked my arms and legs, following the bubbles to the surface of the water. A blast of refreshing air hit my lungs as I broke through the surface of the water.

A few seconds passed and, gulping down the fresh air, I noticed I was treading water in the middle of a gray lake, the dark clouds spiraled overhead like a whirlpool. There was a tremendous pain in my head, a pulsing throb. A warm stream of liquid rushed down my face and into my eyes, blurring my vision with reddish color. My limbs felt heavy and weak, and it was with a great difficulty that I kept my head above the choppy waters of the lake. It felt as if there were anchors fastened to my feet. I shouted out for help, swallowing big gulps of air and water, coughing and gagging.

There in the corner of my eyes, I saw a white object on the lake. Trying to rub the blurry redness from my eyes, I focused on the white shape in the water; it was a boat. There a young man and a woman inside. The hull of the boat was badly crumpled, looking as if it had collided against a protruding rock. To the right of their boat was another boat, capsized, the white hull floating their in the water like a the back of a great white whale. I shouted for help.

The woman on the boat was hunched over, crying, tending to the man in the boat. He was lying on his back, his hand slowly pointing over in my direction but she didn't take notice of it. I shouted again, this time my head submerging under the cold water. I kicked and punched my way back to the surface, and yelled for help again.

This time the woman looked at me, but only for a brief moment. She returned her attention to the man lying on the boat, who was mumbling something to her, a wobbly hand in the air, pointing. She caressed his wet head, rubbing her hand down the side of his face, saying, “Shh, it's going to be okay. You're going to be all right.” She then looked at me a second time, ignoring my shouts.

“Help!” Water forced its way down my throat. “The—lifesaver! Throw me—the lifesaver!” I shouted. She continued ignoring me, nurturing the man on the boat. There was white and red-striped lifesaver on the boat's starboard side, a mere few feet from her, and yet she did nothing. I could feel the water thickening around me, growing colder, and I paddled desperately to keep my head above the choppy waters lapping against my face. The woman continued to ignore my choked screams for help. Water rose up around me, finally overtaking me. I was suspended, helpless, floating there, sinking, sinking…

A black cloud invaded the corners of my eyes, swirling across my vision, stifling out the murky green and blue hues of the lake. Then all was dark.

I awoke abruptly as if from a bad dream, disoriented yet relieved for it to be over, and, lying there on the wooden floor, the pantry door crooked in my vision, I remembered what had happened. Fear was upon me. I lifted my head, which was thumping with pain, feeling as if a powerful blow had split it open. I felt across my scalp, finding a large knot on the left side of my skull. Luckily there was no blood; however, the discovery hadn't done anything to lessen the pain.

I found my mother not far from where I awoke. She was unconscious. I shook her in an attempt to revive her but she was unresponsive. I immediately called for an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived, she was loaded up into a gurney by two paramedics and rolled from the kitchen. I thought I saw her eyes loll open as she was lifted into the back of the ambulance. The hospital was a forty-minute drive from my house, and upon the ambulance's arrival, my mother was pronounced dead. The doctor's said she had undergone a second stroke, which had been the cause of death and was not unusual for stroke victims.

As of today, six days after her death, the funeral arrangements are being finalized. There are still a lot of questions floating through the fog surrounding her death: the legitimacy of her hallucinations and whether she really needed to be medicated, to the substantial blow I had received on my head (which I can still somewhat feel) and its role in the bizarre vision I experienced. These nagging questions want answers, but I know I'll remain unconvinced of every plausible or supernatural explanation, which is why I've decided the best course of action is to dispel this memory from my mind and to these pages I'm writing, and God willing, stash these pages away and put the memory out of my mind forever.

I suppose in time I'll no longer need the television on to serve as background noise during the late hours of the night, or pass a mirror without thinking of seeing that terrible sketch of that face floating just behind me. I suppose one day I won't have the incessant gnawing in the back of my mind, driving my curiosity, compelling me to sift through every last box of my mother's belongings, which occupy several self-storage units, for clues she may be in possession of relative to the my father's previous girlfriend.

But I do not want to know any of this. I want to remember my mother as what she was to me: kind, loving, compassionate. These questions I have, these questions will only lead to answers, which, in turn, will lead to even more questions. It will be an unending cycle. And I am far too old for that, and much to fond of simplicity.

So as of right now, I need to get some much-needed rest, for I've had so little of it since my mother's passing, as has Debra. She has trouble sleeping when the television set is on in the bedroom, although she doesn't say anything. Tonight, I will make sure to keep the volume of the television low enough so it doesn't wake her, and pray that one day I will wake up and not see that wretched green face…