Signs

At 1 in the morning, the shrill ring of my sister Mary’s phone sent us leaping out of our beds.

Mary groped in the darkness and finally located her phone plugged into its charger beside the bed in our room.

“Hello!”

Deb, in the other bed, had at last found the lights, and the three of us shivered in the frigid air conditioning of the motel room.  Mary looked at us and snapped her phone shut.

“No one’s there,” she said.  “It says ‘unknown number’.”

It was the early morning of Terri’s surgery date, Tuesday, August 17^th.  Deb and Mary and I had booked a motel room close to the Omaha hospital where Terri would have her operation.  We crawled into bed again, but sleep was out of the question.  It was odd, that phone call.  Even stranger, it suddenly occurred to me, was the fact that Terri’s surgery should have fallen on Tuesday the 17^th.  Mom had died 31 years ago on a Tuesday morning on the 17^th of April at about 1 o’clock in the morning.  And now, at 1 o’clock, Mary’s phone had been ringing in the darkness.

I’d never been a big believer in signs or much of any thing else supernatural.  Not until Mom died.  But something so strange happened the night Mom died that even 30 years later, it remains crystal clear in all our collective memories.

Dad and we older kids, along with our aunts Patty and MaryLee, and our parish priest Father Kurtenbach, drove home from the hospital at around 2 in the morning right after Mom died.

A kind neighbor had stayed with our younger brothers and sisters and put them to bed.  When we arrived home from the hospital, Dad woke each of our sleeping little siblings and delivered the news.

“Mom’s gone.”  Dad was a mountain of a man, and he gathered each of my weeping brothers and sisters on his lap and tenderly rocked them.  Eventually, in spite of the late hour, we congregated in the living room, and after the trauma of Mom’s death it was a great comfort to feel the nearness of each other.  Harry, Mom’s devoted little mutt terrier, hopped in my lap, circled twice, and plopped down.  The weight of his warm little body was consoling somehow.

We talked for a long time about the events of the night.  Father Kurtenbach coaxed stories about Mom from all of us, but there was a bewildering sense of unreality.  And at last, there was nothing to do but go to bed. 

Father Kurtenbach departed, and as we turned out lights and settled in our beds, the house became dark and quiet. Because my aunts were in my room, I was bunking out on the living room couch, and I cried on a corner of my blanket.  From every other room, I heard soft sniffles and an occasional muffled sob.

“Where’d you go, Mom?” I whispered in the darkness.  “I don’t know where you are.”

As if on cue, Harry, Mom’s dog, suddenly screamed.  It’s the only way any of us could describe it later.  None of us had ever heard a sound like that come out of Harry.  He had been sleeping in his accustomed spot on Mom’s chair in the t.v. room when he suddenly screamed in terror and made a scrambling, yelping dash through the entire length of the house.

We all fell out of our beds, running into each other in the dark and fumbling for lights.  Harry sped straight under Mom and Dad’s bed down the hall, and by the time we gathered in Dad’s room, the little kids were diving frantically under the covers clutching Dad.  My brother Rick pulled poor Harry out from under the bed and spoke soothingly to him.  Harry was trembling violently, and his hind legs suddenly gave out on him completely.

I examined his paws for stickers and searched for any thing logical about his bizarre behavior, and Rick checked him for injuries.  But Harry was fine.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with him except that he was terrified out of his wits.

We were all thinking the same thing.  But the night had been long and traumatic, and this was just altogether too much.  None of us could speak of it just then, but we knew that Harry had seen Mom.  She had come to say goodbye, and Harry had seen her.

“Did you really have to scare Harry to death like that?” I asked her once, sitting by her grave on a calm, summer afternoon a month or so later.  Maybe she did.  It’s been more than 30 years, but we still remember that night.  Mom had to do something big to let us know she was there – something so dramatic we’d remember it for the rest of our lives.

And now, on the morning of Terri’s operation, came that mysterious phone call.  It would be just like Mom to check in with us, to let us know she was keeping an eye out for Terri.  As we were preparing to leave our motel room a few hours later, I asked Deb and Mary if they thought it strange that we received an anonymous phone call.  Did they remember it was the 17^th?   Both looked up with dawning realization.

“I didn’t even think of it,” Mary said. 

We were leaving our motel room and locking the door when I happened to glance up and notice our room number.  “Would you look at that?”   I pointed, in a kind of awe, to our room number. “Room 417.”

April 17^th, that all-important anniversary.

Mom was with us.