The Day my Life became a T.V. Show (revised)

Most of my life I've grown up watching T.V., same as most people in my generation. I was never really an outside kid growing up unless it pertained to a sports activity in which I was involved in. Anyway television was my window into different types of people’s lives & problems. To me T.V. was like real life, it nothing but imitate real life experiences, it just intensifies the environment in which the originally event might have occurred. One of my favorite types of T.V. show was and still is dramas. You know the kind of show that pulls on your heart strings, dramas tend to draw a person in with the emotions of the lead character. We root them while in their conflicts and feel sad when they lose. We empathize and try to relate to their situation, the show goes off and then we move on with the day, never really knowing the feelings that character was trying to invoke.
I don't personally like drama in my own life but do really enjoy watching other people's drama on T.V. So we don’t see the actual mirror that T.V. really portrays, televisions also somehow stretches the truth of the real life situation that dramas is showing us. But one day I had the opportunity to live out my own television drama starring myself and my family.
It was the summertime almost a week after my birthday while in school I received an urgent phone call just like one of the characters would receive on one of my shows which initially gave me a déjà vu moment. The call was from my grandmother telling me I needed to return to my hometown immediately to see my mother. Before this real life T.V. drama began I was just getting close to my mother after our relationship being explosive for most of my life. During my childhood my mother Alice who I was named after was like Dr. Jekell and Ms. Hyde. Now if you know that story which was about a doctor trying to find a cure for an illness and ending giving himself an split personality, well she was kinda like that.
I mean I know my mother loved me, and was extremely proud of me she just didn't really share that information with me directly. Nothing I ever did was acceptable to her, if I received an A on a test she’d ask where’s the extra credit. If I won a track meet and got my picture in the paper she’d say why you didn’t break the record, if I cleaned the house without being told to, she’d get her gloves and try to find mistakes I had made not using her technique. I mean it never stopped, I always heard her praises from a third party to which she had told about my triumphs. But Mommy Dearest never specifically told me, for a longtime growing up I could count on one hand how many time I received the sound of her voice saying to me good job. Due to this straining relationship and a few other reasons which we can't discuss right now I left the nest at the tender age of sixteen. I had my own apartment in another part of the city just for me and my son. My mother and I‘s relationship still went on a lot of rollercoaster rides. It was only at the wise age of twenty that my mother showed me some acknowledgement she actually told me she was proud of me and that was when I met my #1 fan.
For the next few years we talked every day, whenever I felt defeated or had a situation she was right there. At this point in my life my mother was my #1 defender. So when the family was made aware that she was diagnosed with liver disease, I immediately dropped out of college and went to training school in Newark, New Jersey to become a C.N.A. (certified nurse’s assistant) I was going to be the one to take care of her which she would soon need. Back to the story so I'm in school I get that urgent page to get to Christ Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey. The time of the dire call was 9:16a.m., why I still know that actually time is because for about five minutes time stood still and my watch was blinking 9:16, of course that didn't really happen but that's what it felt like in my mind but when I did return to reality I checked my phone's call history and I guess that was when that set time was stored in my head. By this time I was in my car driving forgetting speed limits oblivious to the law I arrived at the hospital at 9:38a.m. I parked my car anywhere and ran into the hospital. I went to the nurse's station to ask where my mother is. The nurse on duty told me she was in room 514C (yeah I remember that too) so I walked really, really fast down the hallway to room 514C.
In this beige and blue room attached to what seemed to me like 10 machines laying in this metal and white bed was my Dr. Jekell & Ms. Hyde mother. Here she was so still in this bed looking so peaceful and strained like she was tied down. So I sat down on the side of her bed first placing my head on chest, I wanted to hear her heartbeat. But then I was reminded of all those machines she was attached too, so I began to question is that her or the machine? Not being able to answer my own question I then placed her hand in mine and stared at this angelic creature that to me for so long was so strong but now looked so helpless. I stared at that angelic creature in this bed with all those machines attached for awhile she began to look like she was sleeping I think I started to imagine that she was just sleeping in her own bed snoring as usual. Then the reality hit me again and the visual that I really had came back those damn machines.
After some time my little sister arrived , she is a few years younger than me but we both were grown, there still was another sister, this teenage girl in a 5Th grade class oblivious to what was going on . Well my little sister entered room 514C, while I was still sitting at my mother bedside hand in hand, she just stood at the foot of the bed staring. Here comes the T.V. moment, as I sit on the side of the bed my mother 's hand in mine my sister started to touch my mother's leg once both of our hands were touching her at the same tie those damn machines started to beep, the alarm on the machine which tells you her heart rate and blood pressure changed color . The monitor once black with two red lines, one solid and straight the other wavy like the ocean are now both blue and straight just like on T.V. My mother had flat lined my sister and I looked up at each other and then a team of nurses and doctors swarmed in the room same as the shows I watch so often. One of the nurses told me that we had to leave the room. And in that moment which seemed like an eternity we froze and neither I nor my sister could move. I personally was stuck in amazement looking at an actual crash cart with paddle that another nurse was placing on my mother's chest, I then looked over at my sister and she was on the floor. An orderly had to carry her into the waiting room the nurse escorted me into.
While my sister and I waited in this dull beige and brown closet like room, the team attempted to revive my mother. As we waited a lifetime in that dull beige & brown room two priest walked in just like on T.V., one African American and the other Caucasian. When I saw them I guess that's when the true reality of the situation set in and I began to scream NO, NO, NO. I told the ministers to get out it not over yet, y'all came too early. But they weren't because at that moment when I was trying to get rid of them the doctor came into our closet like waiting room. The look on her face told the story but she still utter those famous T.V. words," we did all we could do but she didn't pull thru". At first I just gazed at the doctor as she then told us her official time of death which was 12:23pm. Yeah just about three hours after I arrived at Christ Hospital in Jersey City, I was instructed to say goodbye to my #1 fan. I was told to let go of my Dr. Jekell & Ms. Hyde mother and I didn't want to even thou most of my life she had a split personality she was still MOMMY.
This woman taught me mostly everything I know from paying a bill to getting men to do what you want. She was the mother all my friends wished was theirs when I was in elementary school, this was the lady I would die fro but also worked my last nerve. I felt that I had too many more lessons to learn. When that team of doctors and nurses couldn't save my mother I felt cheated like T.V. had lied to me, but I realized I wasn't on T.V. Because on the shows they scare you a little but the character always pull thru, but not MOMMY. We would love to have T.V. live our lives for us for things to go wrong but just for a little while to know that by the end of that scene everything would be alright again. But real life moments are not like T.V. moments they differ in the fact that T.V. has commercials and it shows stops after a set amount of time where as real life stops but always keeps going making up its own time line and rules never ending. My T.V. moment is forever embedded in my memory, it would also never end I live with that visual every day. For the next few days my family and I made arrangement to lay our angelic peacefully sleeping mother to rest. Ever since August 25, 2003, at 12:23pm I've felt unwhole, every day I feel like I'm forgetting something. Maybe its guilt over the fact that I wasn't able to take care of her like I now feel she took care of me. I mean how a person can get over losing their center, their defender; their #1 fan. The only peace of mind that I have is the fact that I know she's back where she belongs showing God her Dr. Jekell & Ms. Hyde personality every day until we meet again. In retrospect of my T.V. moment I learned or realized a very good point, T.V. does mirror real life but thru Rose colored glasses, and when stuff happens in the real world without your glasses it hurts. We watch events occur on the television but in life we feel things happen to us.