She lay on the bed,
between the reflective white sheets,
looking pale even in comparison to them.
At home she had seemed more lively,
but here is seemed as though she no longer
had any will to go on.
The pale brown pitcher of water stood on the
wooden swinging table beside her bed,
accompanied only by a tray of the same color,
with remnants of a long forgotten meal
scattered across the surface.
Upon entering the room,
I could smell the odor that always
comes with a hospital room,
and tough I have never considered
it to be the smell of death,
it is simple to categorize it so.
It was not the smell that
assulted my senses on this particular visit,
but what I heard that tore me to pieces emotionally.
My mother lay dying on the bed,
looking out with eyes that so obviously saw nothing,
and breathing with lungs that sounded as thought
she were submerged in a thick and unforgiving liquid
that she not had to force herself to breath through.
It was the most horrific sound I had ever heard.
The same sound coming from a water pump
or a loudly purring kitten would be so innocuous.
It was the fact that the audible pop and rattle
emanating from the room was coming from the now
pursed, and undentured lips, of my dying mother.
I have heard this sound again since that day,
and it always brings me back to that day that
my mother passed from this world to another.
