Hineni, Here I Am
Dahlia Fisher
Northeast Ohio Writer
I am by my mother’s bedside, and she is dying. I cannot imagine anything else beyond this moment. All the feelings I have ever had are colliding at once. I am forty-five years old. I am not a child. But I am her child. Sleep has been difficult. Everything feels bigger, deeper, worse. Somehow, although I have no idea how, I am not hysterical, not panicking, not dying myself. I am calm, for the moment. I am breathing. I am holding her hand.
The room is white. Sterile. Cool but not cold. There is a soothing energy about this place. The last room, the hospital room, was mauve vinyl and birch wood with fluorescent overhead lights that buzzed when the rest of the room was quiet. I can still feel the sound of buzzing lights in my ears, and the startle of beeping monitors each time they blared their horns, and the occasional rush-rush-rush of nurse clogs dashing the hallway, passing by my mother’s room in a blur of navy scrubs. Doctors. Cafeteria trays. Smells of tomato soup. Chicken broth. Cleaning supplies. Disinfectant. Sedentary bodies. Sickness. Scared families whispering in the halls. Sobbing. Sniffling. More beeping.
No one speaks of death. They use the word hospice. The doctors, the nurses, the social workers, they say things like, “We’ll have someone from hospice come and talk to you, so you understand your options.” None of those people want you to die in the hospital.
Simon says hospitals want low death counts because it’s good for business. “Who wants to go to a hospital with a high death count?” Of course, as soon as he says it, I know he is right, because he’s always right. When those hospital people decide they are done with you, they mean business. They tell you, without telling you, “Don’t die here. This is not a place to die, this is a place to get well and if we cannot make you well, then go die somewhere else.” And, just like that, you’re out.
At hospice there are no beeping monitors. There is only the sound of my mother’s breath. I am acutely aware that her breath makes noise, and that this is a noise I want to hear, even though it is gurgled, uneven, labored, and uncomfortable. Hearing it means that she is alive. She is dying, but she is not dead.
According to my friend, who is a chaplain in a hospital, my mother would be able to hear me until the very end. “Hearing is the last sense to go,” my friend explained. I could talk to my mother, say all the things I never had the chance to say, tell her I love her and that I am sorry, which are, apparently, the things most people say. “This is your chance to be together in the last days or hours or minutes of your mother’s life, this God’s gift to you,” my friend said. “God is giving you a chance to be at peace with death.”
I could not understand how any of these words had been strung together to make a sentence. Mother. God. Gift. Peace. Death. Those were words that fit together on a Scrabble board or New York Times crossword. Nonsense words.
Still, I wanted my mother to know that I showed up for her the way she showed up for me. Time and time again, she came to my rescue. Time and time again, she lifted me up when I had fallen so far down. I disappointed her. I embarrassed her. I was not who she had hoped for. I was not the child she had wanted. I was not a quiet girl. I was not a good girl. I was not a sweet girl. All in pink. Neatly combed hair. A perfectly placed barrette. Buckle shoes. Lace socks. Knee length skirts. Dainty flower patterns. I was screaming from rooftops. Jumping from speeding cars. Dancing in open fields. Getting high in bathrooms. Drinking from the bottle. Passing out on hotel floors. Traveling nowhere feeling like I owned everywhere. She wanted me to be a librarian. I wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. She wanted me to set the table for a family dinner. I wanted to break the plates. She wanted me to listen to my father. I wanted to punch my father in the face. She wanted me to be some-kind-of perfect. I couldn’t be that for her. I didn’t know how. I was broken, damaged, wrestling demons and darkness I didn’t understand and couldn’t name.
If it wasn’t for the theater, the arts, I don’t know how I would have survived. I wrote plays and invented characters that said my words. To which my mother had said, “You don’t have to tell so much truth, Dahlia.” With a disapproving shake of her head, and a pat-pat-pat of her hand over mine, “It’s not so good to tell everything. It’s better to be quiet.”
I am quiet now. My mouth is dry. My head is woozy. My eyes are sore from wiping away a steady flow of tears with tissues, with shirt hems, with fingertips, with washcloths. Tiny fissures have formed at the corners, where wrinkles have also recently started to show. I watch the way her chest rises and falls, studying the crease between her brow that resembles the lines I see on my face in the mirror each morning. I remember the sigh of her voice calling me from the kitchen, my name lilting into the air in a singsong see-saw, “Dah-lee-uhh,” like a dinner bell, like a bird chirp, like a breeze, and I feel that I have never been more present, or more certain about where I am, or what I am doing.
“Here I am,” the words barely escape. In Jewish tradition, the phrase “Here I am,” is to say I am fully present and ready for higher purpose. The Hebrew word for this feeling is, Hineni. I say to my mother and before God, “Hineni,” pushing tears from the corners of my eyes with the corners of my mother’s white bed sheets. “Here I am.”
The room is white. Sterile. Cool but not cold. There is a soothing energy about this place. The last room, the hospital room, was mauve vinyl and birch wood with fluorescent overhead lights that buzzed when the rest of the room was quiet. I can still feel the sound of buzzing lights in my ears, and the startle of beeping monitors each time they blared their horns, and the occasional rush-rush-rush of nurse clogs dashing the hallway, passing by my mother’s room in a blur of navy scrubs. Doctors. Cafeteria trays. Smells of tomato soup. Chicken broth. Cleaning supplies. Disinfectant. Sedentary bodies. Sickness. Scared families whispering in the halls. Sobbing. Sniffling. More beeping.
No one speaks of death. They use the word hospice. The doctors, the nurses, the social workers, they say things like, “We’ll have someone from hospice come and talk to you, so you understand your options.” None of those people want you to die in the hospital.
Simon says hospitals want low death counts because it’s good for business. “Who wants to go to a hospital with a high death count?” Of course, as soon as he says it, I know he is right, because he’s always right. When those hospital people decide they are done with you, they mean business. They tell you, without telling you, “Don’t die here. This is not a place to die, this is a place to get well and if we cannot make you well, then go die somewhere else.” And, just like that, you’re out.
At hospice there are no beeping monitors. There is only the sound of my mother’s breath. I am acutely aware that her breath makes noise, and that this is a noise I want to hear, even though it is gurgled, uneven, labored, and uncomfortable. Hearing it means that she is alive. She is dying, but she is not dead.
According to my friend, who is a chaplain in a hospital, my mother would be able to hear me until the very end. “Hearing is the last sense to go,” my friend explained. I could talk to my mother, say all the things I never had the chance to say, tell her I love her and that I am sorry, which are, apparently, the things most people say. “This is your chance to be together in the last days or hours or minutes of your mother’s life, this God’s gift to you,” my friend said. “God is giving you a chance to be at peace with death.”
I could not understand how any of these words had been strung together to make a sentence. Mother. God. Gift. Peace. Death. Those were words that fit together on a Scrabble board or New York Times crossword. Nonsense words.
Still, I wanted my mother to know that I showed up for her the way she showed up for me. Time and time again, she came to my rescue. Time and time again, she lifted me up when I had fallen so far down. I disappointed her. I embarrassed her. I was not who she had hoped for. I was not the child she had wanted. I was not a quiet girl. I was not a good girl. I was not a sweet girl. All in pink. Neatly combed hair. A perfectly placed barrette. Buckle shoes. Lace socks. Knee length skirts. Dainty flower patterns. I was screaming from rooftops. Jumping from speeding cars. Dancing in open fields. Getting high in bathrooms. Drinking from the bottle. Passing out on hotel floors. Traveling nowhere feeling like I owned everywhere. She wanted me to be a librarian. I wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. She wanted me to set the table for a family dinner. I wanted to break the plates. She wanted me to listen to my father. I wanted to punch my father in the face. She wanted me to be some-kind-of perfect. I couldn’t be that for her. I didn’t know how. I was broken, damaged, wrestling demons and darkness I didn’t understand and couldn’t name.
If it wasn’t for the theater, the arts, I don’t know how I would have survived. I wrote plays and invented characters that said my words. To which my mother had said, “You don’t have to tell so much truth, Dahlia.” With a disapproving shake of her head, and a pat-pat-pat of her hand over mine, “It’s not so good to tell everything. It’s better to be quiet.”
I am quiet now. My mouth is dry. My head is woozy. My eyes are sore from wiping away a steady flow of tears with tissues, with shirt hems, with fingertips, with washcloths. Tiny fissures have formed at the corners, where wrinkles have also recently started to show. I watch the way her chest rises and falls, studying the crease between her brow that resembles the lines I see on my face in the mirror each morning. I remember the sigh of her voice calling me from the kitchen, my name lilting into the air in a singsong see-saw, “Dah-lee-uhh,” like a dinner bell, like a bird chirp, like a breeze, and I feel that I have never been more present, or more certain about where I am, or what I am doing.
“Here I am,” the words barely escape. In Jewish tradition, the phrase “Here I am,” is to say I am fully present and ready for higher purpose. The Hebrew word for this feeling is, Hineni. I say to my mother and before God, “Hineni,” pushing tears from the corners of my eyes with the corners of my mother’s white bed sheets. “Here I am.”
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Dahlia Fisher (she/her) is a published author, produced playwright, seasoned performer, and writing/performance instructor living in Cleveland, OH. She holds a BA in theater, an MA in communications, and is currently completing her MFA in creative writing. She is co-founder of Rebel Readers Cleveland, building bridges between cultures and communities through books.
Social Media Substack: @dahliawritenow Instagram: @dahliawritenow |
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