Turkey Sandwich

Not Just Prison Swill

Nine Lives

My mom fell again. This time in her house. She stood up from a chair that was a little too low, lost her balance, and hit her head on the sharp edge of a piece of furniture. The laceration was about an inch and a half long, and because she’s on blood thinners, it looked like a crime scene. For a moment it was full-on CSI: Miami — bright red pooling across the wood floor, far more blood than seemed possible from a head. She was coherent. Sad. Embarrassed. Mostly upset that her body doesn’t do what she tells it to anymore.

Six hours in the ER under fluorescent lights that make everyone look already halfway to ghost. CT scan. EKG. Blood panel. A hip replacement in October. Diligent physical therapy. Back to living independently at 91, which felt like beating the odds. And yet here we were again, waiting to be told this brush with death was just another nick. I don’t know how many of her nine lives she’s used up in the last nine months. Four, maybe, five.

There’s something uniquely brutal about watching your parent negotiate with gravity. It isn’t dramatic. It’s domestic. A chair. A miscalculation. The quiet realization that the ordinary can injure you now. She hates that she can’t move the way she wants to. She hates being a burden. The truth is, family is a burden. The sacred kind. The one you don’t resign from. The one that rearranges your calendar and your nervous system without asking. You know this if you’re lucky, Bitches.

What unsettled me wasn’t the blood. It was the trajectory. Not a crisis. A direction. Sitting there under humming lights, I could see it clearly — not just her future, but mine. For a moment I could see myself at 91, standing up from something too low and losing the negotiation.

The Sandwich

Around 9 p.m., a nurse asked if I wanted something to eat. We’d been there since five. CT scan pending. Blood work pending. My mother stitched but somehow smaller in the next bay. A turkey sandwich sounded almost civilized. What arrived was three pale slices of turkey folded over themselves between two pieces of aggressively white bread, wrapped in cellophane like a Twinkie. Probably the same shelf life. On the side, a tiny packet of light mayonnaise, which felt absurd under the circumstances. At that point, just decide you’re going to eat mayonnaise. We were well past restraint. I wondered if prisons used the same vendor. I thought of that guy on The Pitt who keeps asking for a sandwich like it’s mercy. It was bleak and faintly ridiculous.

And then I opened it. I squeezed the entire packet of light mayonnaise onto the bread and took a bite. It was soft and salty and exactly right. I ate it without analysis. I didn’t care about preservatives or dignity or whether the turkey was folded like surrender. I was hungry. It tasted good. It tasted better because someone had noticed that I had been sitting there for four hours holding it together while my mother lay behind a curtain.

She fears decline. I fear the moment control shifts. The two sit quietly under fluorescent lights and pretend they are different. She got stitches. I got a sandwich. We both went home.

Driving back under the streetlights, I kept thinking about how easily the body gives way. One day the chair will be too low for me. One day I may be the one behind the curtain while someone else reviews the scan results. And eventually the decision will no longer be mine.