My mom died two years ago. It was a long, excruciating process that ended up with her being in the ICU for a month on a ventilator, slowly drowning to death in lungs that were too withered and tired to carry on. The whole experience was God-awful traumatic: heartbreaking, agonizing, ghoulish. 

After two years I have found that grief doesn’t recede, it just got molded into my life like a fitted sheet. I sometimes take it for granted, but I have to take it out once in a while, give it a shake and wash it. I can go for days without thinking about it, but it’s always there. I’ll always have it in my life, and it will always be king-sized.

I have three triggers. The things that pull me back to that hospital room with all the machines beeping and lights blinking and nurses in quiet shoes slipping in and out. I can still see her eyes, so big at the end, like they could swallow the world in their blueish gray pools. And I can see the tube running down her throat, halting her from speaking, from using her voice to tell me what her eyes could only plead.

But the triggers. I’ve found that they aren’t visual cues. Some say the sense of smell is most tied to memories, but that isn’t what gets me either. There are three specific sounds that I can’t for my very life bear to hear.

The first was found in the most ridiculous place: a Burger King. My husband and I were in the dining room of our local fast food joint and an alarm on some machine went off. (Were the fries in danger of burning? I don’t know.) But the sound was the exact replica of my mother’s ventilator when her breathing was in distress. A klaxon of terror. When I heard it, hand with french fry halfway to ketchup, I froze, barely able to control the urge to jump up and find the nurse. Surely she was there and could come help me? I haven’t been back to a Burger King since.

The second is one that I run into quite often. I live in a community that is aging. The median age of the population of my county is 65. Which means there are a lot of people who come into the library where I work with canes, walkers, and oxygen machines. The oxygen machine is sound number two. Pssht. Pssht. Those little puffs that shove air into the nostrils. This one, since it is not reminiscent of the hospital, is a bit easier to manage. But I still remember her, trying to walk more than ten feet without gasping for air, even with the tubes up her nose, feeling my heart twist in agony because I could not fix her.

The last is the most painful. It is a ringtone on a cell phone. My Dad’s, to be exact. There was a TV show from the ’50s by a comedian called Ernie Kovacs. He had a brash piano ditty as an opening that my Dad sampled and made his ringtone. This happened to be the one that was set that month when my mother was in the hospital. It’s a merry melody, meant to make you smile. 

The first time it shot its needle into my ear was the night after her first surgery. We were all sleeping in the hotel room when it blared through the dark, wrenching us awake knowing that only bad news could be delivered at such an hour. And within the hour we were back at the hospital, waiting to hear about how she tolerated the second, emergency surgery to fix her small intestine that had ruptured.

But the final time I heard it was on that last morning. She had been at Tampa General, a three-hour drive from where we live. We had been traveling back and forth because money was running out after a month and we couldn’t afford hotels anymore. But when Dad called me at 3 am on June 2, 2018, he said we had to go that moment if we wanted to see her to say goodbye

The three of us, Dad, my husband, and myself were in the car. I was driving. We almost made it there, we were fifteen minutes from the hospital when Dad’s cell phone rang, blasting that little piano tune that will forever seize me with terror and despair. He answered it as I navigated the freeway, getting ready to exit. She was gone–slipped away when we were so close. I felt everything fall away even though somehow I held it together behind the wheel to get us safely to the hospital. We went upstairs to the fifth floor so slowly (for what was the hurry now?) and saw her. 

She looked so small.

The aftermath of death is also horrific, especially losing someone like a parent. It’s something that almost everyone experiences, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I spent most of the car ride home making my way through a box of tissues as I sobbed for a woman who had to go at just 67 years old. For someone who didn’t want to die, who still had things to do

It’s not just those three sounds that can pull me back, but they certainly get me there in the most direct route. Immediately I am sitting on the vinyl couch in her hospital room, knitting, jumping up every time her ventilator would blare or something else would beep. It was a month of monumental anguish, one I hope to never repeat.

But it’s the risk you take when you love someone. And I will do it again if need be because I’ll never shut my heart to love. 

I’ll just keep getting more fitted sheets.

– Anna Karras