by Shaun Argent
I abandoned the idea of driving myself to the hospital as I had when the mentally ill son of a minister driving around Berkeley and shooting women, had fired two bullets into my left wrist and two others into my neck. I had been thirty-four years old then, nearly 20 year younger and with no previous concussion.
Three decades of marriage to a surgeon and my experience working as a medical technologist in a blood bank had taught me much about recognizing your limits.
On hearing the woman speak the words, “ … husband … I’m going to call him,” I had thought to call mine. He would be busy seeing patients.
I dialed our eldest daughter who on arriving stated she had just passed the debris lying in the street, all the while wondering what had occurred and if all involved were okay.
If only my mother had been able to deliver the same.
Our daughter’s arrival at the accident brought comfort, quite unlike my mother, who on entering my hospital room, five days after I had undergone surgery to repair the damage done by the bullets to my neck, she declared, “No one told me you had been shot, only that you had been in a car accident.”
Following the surgery, as I had requested, my husband had told her the truth. He assured me this and had no reason to lie. It was at this time, I recognized the revisionist historian that lived in my mother.
How else could someone live with knowing all they had done–the harsh statements they had spoken to others including her husband and me, her daughter and what she done to me?
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