Still So Much to Say
MICHAEL BOURNE is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. His debut novel, Blithedale Canyon, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in July.
MY MOTHER’S face floated into view on my iPad, blotched red and emaciated, her usually immaculate, trimmed white hair wet-welded to her scalp. She looked like she’d been in a fight, and of course she had. For the past fourteen months, she had been battling stage 4 lung cancer, and now, after a series of medical setbacks, she was calling me from a hospital bed in northern California.
After we spent a few minutes bemoaning the pandemic that kept me from flying home to see her in person, we turned to the real, if unstated, reason for her call: What to do about her debut collection of stories, Spotswood, Virginia, which she’d placed with a university press six months before. I had sold my debut novel, Blithedale Canyon, not long before she sold her book, and for months, as she struggled for breath on the phone, we traded tips on book promotion and amused ourselves with plans for a mother-son book tour. Now she was back in the hospital, all her last-ditch therapies having failed, and we were no longer pretending.
“So, I guess you’re going to have to see this book through for me,” she told me, her husky voice barely above a whisper.
A few weeks earlier I would’ve told her not to worry, that she’d be out of bed in no time and we would be appearing together in bookstores across the state. Now I told her, simply, that I’d do my best. We spoke a few minutes more until, exhausted and gasping for breath, she signed off. In a matter of days she was under hospice care, and a few days after that
