A Polar Fragile: A Short Story

One year ago, we were in the middle of what the weathermen now call a polar vortex. The temperature was well below freezing outside as I hustled across a frigid parking garage to enter the University of Louisville hospital. On television, newscasters were throwing cups of water into the air to show how it would breeze before it even hit the ground. I could relate as my breath seemed to come out of my mouth in miniature ice crystals. Unfortunately, the reality of the fragility of life was also freezing me on the inside. For two days, I had sat with my family in a hospital room watching my mom fade away after a sudden, unexpected, and massive stroke essentially sucked the life right out of her. No surgeries could fix the hemorrhage on her …show more content…
He was new and didn’t know us or my mom very well, so we spent an hour talking to him about her life. We told funny stories about her, told about her personality, and just basically remembered as many of the good times as we could. I’ve always been the rebel child, so to speak, so tales of the trouble I got into were thrown in there. My mom liked to ride horses, play bridge and euchre, sing in the choir at church, and never ever missed a sporting event that one of us participated in. She was nosy as hell, always had to know what was going on, and called us (her children) sometimes as many as five times a day. It drove me crazy. She had been married to my dad for over fifty years so their relationship and courtship was one that we talked about a lot. They got married when my mom was seventeen and my dad was twenty-one. They had traveled all over in the years they were married. That was one of their favorite things to do was take vacations. They had traveled all over the United States, through Canada, to Mexico, across the Pacific to Hawaii, and had taken two Caribbean cruises to various islands and South American countries. They had lived a full life together, but it was not one that my dad was prepared to end. None of us