On that last day when Dr. Peters examined Old Mother once again, he stayed with me throughout the night. He never tried to reassure me. In fact, he did the opposite, telling me that Old Mother had only a few hours to live, but I wasn’t ready to hear that. I guess I still believed in miracles.
Old Mother was lucid then. She spoke to both of us, telling the doctor where he could find some money to pay for her care, and informing me that everything she owned was to belong to me after her death.
I hadn’t wanted to hear that. I’d brushed her words away, telling her that she would soon get better and we could once more hunt for herbs in the woods and make potions for the sick.
“You were the sweet smelling flower of my old age, Shama. I am grateful that you shared your company and your youth with me. I love you, child,” she’d said.
I was holding her hand. I squeezed it gently and whispered that I loved her, too. “Please get well,” I whispered.
She started coughing then, and the doctor moved closer, but in a moment, her cough stopped. Her breath was a steady wheezing and grating noise that told me that each breath she took caused her pain. I wanted to fix it, to make her well again. I ran my mind over all the witchy things she’d taught me, but nothing relieved lungs so badly consumed by fluid.
“Isn’t there something we can . . .?” I asked the doctor.
“I’m dying, Shama. He can’t help me . . . nor . . . can you,” Old Mother had said, her voice so unlike what I’d come to know that it sounded like a stranger’s
“Doctor, see that Shama . . . gets . . . everything. Don’t let . . . the villagers . . .”
Another coughing fit seized her body and almost lifted her into the air. I wondered for a moment if the goddess was taking her, but the rattling throat noses told me she was still with us.
“She cannot live here, Matilda,” the doctor said. “The village will take back the cottage and seize all the furniture. You know it wasn’t yours to keep,” he told her with the soft voice of someone who cared, who maybe even had loved her once.
That was the first time I’d ever heard her real first name. Even the villagers called her Old Mother.
“Do you want some water?” I asked mainly to be doing something, but she shook her head.
“Help the child, Sam. Please.”
Those were Old Mother’s last words. Her body wilted in on itself then, shriveling into the empty shell that a body takes on after the soul departs.
My lungs collapsed in that moment, too. No air. My heart almost stopped its frantic beating. I knew she was gone, wouldn’t hurt anymore, and couldn’t hear me, but I leaned forward and kissed her cheek once more. “I love you,” I’d said.