DEPARTURE by Hal Ackerman

She is on the commode when I find her, head bent nearly to the floor, arms reaching for her walker in supplication. The outline of her spine is like the bent balsa skeleton of a kite, strong and so close to snapping. She is horrified for me to see that she has soiled herself. Why didn’t you let me go, she wails, as though I am the one who has tethered her to the earth. Her arm reaches behind her for the roll of tissue. Her arthritic hand is slow, as the earliest demonstrations of robotics. The day has come, she says. And she means the moment she has seen draw closer during the years of her increasing diminishment. She has sent gilt invitations to Death, bedecked herself in finery, entreated him with all her seductive power to come for her. But as in her early life, she is the wallflower, passed over in death for younger women taken down with kidney failure, heart failure, cancer and foul play. She would jitterbug with death if he were the least accomplished dancer at the table, dirt under his nails, unshaved and slovenly. She would throw her head back and let her scarf billow in the wind if he would only take her home.

I find leverage under her sallow cheeks and raise her across my shoulders. She looks no heavier than ashes and dry straw, but she has swallowed the shame of gravity and I feel my back give way under the strain. I envision the paramedics rushing to the scene, discovering a middle-aged man splayed across his mother’s naked body, wondering what depravity they have stumbled onto. I soak a washcloth under warm running water, clean her toadstool buttocks, pat her dry, find a fresh set of diaper pants on the adjacent shelf, place one bamboo leg into them then the other, carry her across the threshold and set her down on her bed. Her blankets and sheets are folded precisely; broken unlit matches on the nightstand. Beside the memorial candle, the bottle of sleeping pills is opened. Those she has not taken are spilled like carelessly scattered seeds. She has been a widow forty-three years today. I ignite the wick and watch its light flicker across the translucent skin of her sleeping face.

One night, I am late. When I arrive, she has already taken the first irrevocable step from just barely here to just barely not. And for the rest of time, she and I will be two raindrops rolling down opposite sides of the mountain into separate oceans. What remains of her turns so quickly cold. How deep inside her must I dig to find warmth? The alarm bells echo in my ear today. But now it is I who am like a mother, lactating at every imagined cry from an empty crib.

On his final walk-through her apartment, the landlord has noted the nail holes in the walls. He has seen the patio screen shredded by her cat and the dark nebula in the carpet alongside her bed stained from the blood that seeped all night from her chest where the iron tongue of her walker punctured her onion-thin skin. When the Mexican boys came with their moving dollies, wheeled out her dining room table and mahogany dresser, that was the last of it. Her home exhaled its life as she had done, reverted to its natural state. Person into body. Some walls with shapes. Some light. Strangely smaller than the way she had first seen it, her eyes then like a little girl’s, painting it full of possibilities. 

Outside her door, someone has already scratched two dark lines through her name, as she has done in her phone book to lost friends. There is some defiance in the decision to cross out, not to erase. We have been here and gone. Not, We never were. It is the time of morning when I have called each day to see whether she was alive. Out of habit or morbid curiosity I press the single button. The phone rings twice and a mechanized voice informs me that I have reached a number no longer in service. 

Are you enjoying your death? Is it all you had hoped for? Is the pain gone? Are the neighbors all there, talking over the backyard fence? Is dad frozen at forty-eight, when he died, still in love with you? Have you left the bent, chalky desiccated chaff of your body behind? Are you the woman in her wedding gown smiling hopefully into the future? Are you dancing?

The screen on the cell phone asks:

Do you wish to delete “Mother?” 

Press 1 to confirm.  

Press 2 to cancel.

Hal Ackerman’s short fiction has appeared in The Idaho Review and New Millennium, among many others. He’s published two “soft-boiled” murder mysteries, the award-winning solo play, PRICK (How Prostate Cancer made a Man of Me) and Write Screenplays that Sell, evolved from three decades co-chairing the UCLA Screenwriting Program.

21 November 2025