Rhinestone Cowboys
By Jane Richards
Photo courtesy of Jane Richards
Sunlight floods the windows in what used to be Pat’s kitchen. One window has a bird feeder attached to it. You can watch them pick at the seeds from the table. Pat liked cardinals, especially in the winter. She loved how the red feathers contrast to white snow.
Pat would sit in her usual spot at the dining room table. I would enter the front door and wave my arms over my head to get her attention. She had been deaf my whole life. We called her Pat because the sharp syllable was easy to detect with muffled hearing. She would then yell, and I mean yell, “Just a minute” while she put her hearing aids on. This minute was important because Pat did not like to be left out of the conversation. She had three fears: third was being excluded, second was being forgotten, and first was dying.
At her dining table, the cups before us were brimming with nostalgia. The recipe was simple: a sprinkle of Cafe mate Original Coffee Creamer, a Pacific Bold Costco K-Cup, and one pale yellow packet of Splenda artificial sweetener. She used to exclaim from her seat while I made our drinks that she wanted, “Coffee so strong it makes you want to slap your grandmother!”. She drank out of paper coffee cups that were easier for her shaking hands to control. The time from which this cup of coffee was made to the time it was emptied, was the best time of my life.
Pat was a wealth of knowledge, humor and hardship. She was a walking western novel and a talking judge’s gavel. Her forty years of sobriety were proof of her resilience. Our conversations at the dining room table about travels, alcoholism, schoolwork, lovers, parents, and children are my most precious memories. Near the end, we had many tear-soaked conversations where she promised me she would never die. Right there, at the dining room table, she held a wet tissue in her shaking hand and swore, “God damn it, I won’t die!”. As if she had a choice.
When I picture Pat’s house now, I think of these conversations in that dining room. I focus on the Thanksgivings, birthdays, sleepovers, cups of coffee, puzzles pieces, bowls of raisins and mugs of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I can sit easily with the memories of people gathered in the kitchen around platters of grocery store cookies for my grandfather's wake. I don’t mind the image of her fussing as I fed her chicken broth through a straw when her health was declining. However, one memory I seldom revisit is the day I walked in and everything was quiet.
It was seven AM and early August. No one was crying or hysterical or loud. It was unlike my family. My uncle was organizing pill bottles and planning how to dispose of the medical equipment collected over the past three months. My mother was burning sage and praying. My brother was sipping coffee in his work clothes. I felt trapped, like I was paralyzed on the couch.
Pat’s body lay there. Cold. Unmoving. Lifeless. Her eyes were closed and her wrinkled face poised in eternal sleep. Her hands were covered by the bed sheet. I wanted to hold them, but I was afraid. I did not want to feel them stiff and cool. I longed for them to be warm and shaking. I told myself to cry, but my eyes were dry. Paralysis held me still, I could only open and close my mouth like a fish.
How was no one freaking out? The most important woman in the world just died and no one was bothered. I was on the couch next to the loaned hospital bed in her living room. The couches were patterned with dark roses. The cushions were so soft that when Pat and I laid down we would practically sink into the floral cover. After she died, much like the rest of the house, the couch smelt of urine. Pat became incontinent. She could no longer control her dignity. Even in her end-of-life delirium, I knew she would hate that the laundry was not bleached to be rid of the smell. She would have enjoyed being an inconvenience though. I wish that she could have known that all the people in the house were there just to see her.
Urine was not the only smell, there was also smoke. My mother walked about the room wafting sage smoke with a feather “to help guide Pat’s spirit to the afterlife”. Pat had informed me long ago that she did not need anyone telling her about religion, “I went to hell, and I danced with the devil, and I got my own damn self out of there. I didn’t need religion, I needed AA.”. I thought about this as I received condolences saying she was going to a better place. Don’t tell her where to go I tried, but the words wouldn’t come.
The living room was darker than it should have been. The blinds were down which felt unnatural in the summertime. If I could stand, I would raise them and let the August sun filter through the thick air of the room, but paralysis held me to my seat in the dark. It really didn’t matter because my vision blurred anyways. I stared straight ahead towards her, but black splotches filled my eyes. The dark room and the momentary blindness were frustrating because I wanted to see her. I wanted to memorize her whole face before they took her away.
The first time I wanted to memorize her; I was a child. We sat on her back porch and watched the clouds. I tried to mirror the way she sat and the bend of her neck as she looked towards the sky. Pat learned about clouds in the western novels she read. She explained that being able to read even the slightest shift in the atmosphere was important for finding cover before the sky opened.
She told me stories about the high country often. I was unsure if they were her own experiences or if they were from novels she had read but she told them so colorfully I didn’t really care to learn the origin. She explained the Rocky Mountains and the type of horses you need to traverse them. She talked about long floats in the Colorado river and detailed the sorts of trout you catch when you go fly fishing. She reminisced on campfires and canned beans. When she talked about the mountains, you could see her eyes glaze over like she was in another world, shooting down outlaws and riding with cowboys. Now she really was in another world… or at least not in this world. She was out there somewhere.
In the days before she passed, my mom whispered to her, “It’s okay if you want to leave us, mom. You can go find peace.”. I wanted to scream at her. It’s not okay I wanted to say. She can decide when she wants to go. Stop telling her what to do!
In my first year of college I watched from afar as a friend drove himself into addiction. I told Pat about it over Thanksgiving break. After her sobriety, she became an AA counselor for several years. I explained that I was nervous for my friend, but I didn't know what I could do to help. She took a sip of her coffee and stated plainly, “There’s nothing you can do.” I looked at her blankly, “What?”. She laughed a little, “I’m serious. The only time he will get sober, is when he decides he wants to get sober. Nobody else can make that decision for him, he must do it for himself.”. I pondered, “Why?”. She put her cup down spilling a little from the shakes, “I tried for years to be sober for my husband, for my kids, for revenge on those who said I couldn’t, but it didn’t work. Nothing mattered until I wanted to be clean for myself.”. I never forgot this conversation with Pat. What if she wasn’t ready to die? Did she get to make that decision for herself?
At Pat’s funeral I watched the eulogy from a round folding table with a plastic tablecloth. They played the song “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell. It was a song she used to play in the car when she drove all five of her children on cross-country road trips. The pre-chorus sings, “There’s been a load of compromising, on the road to my horizon, but I’m gonna be where the lights are shinin’ on me”. I laugh now at the idea that all Pat’s compromising ended with me. Did she know through all that suffering, a little girl would be the one to shine the stage light on her? Did she know that a woman so desperate to be alive would never die to me?
About the Author
Jane is a fourth-year student at Northeastern University majoring in Health Science and pursuing a future in nursing. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, traveling, and going to the beach.