Prompt #7 - What Was Your Greatest Loss?
Mom died in the fall. I'll always remember it if only for the apples spilled across the floor, juicy and ripe and just picked from a neighbor's farm. She was almost cold to the touch when we found her, but she was still breathing. Still alive. She hung on for a little while ... was it that night, or a few nights later that she died? I honestly don't remember. It's all so mashed together in my mind. I made Al go get Granny Pinako. He didn't want to, but I made him go. I didn't want him to have to be there if she died right then. He had only just turned eight, he didn't need to be there for that. Didn't matter that I'm barely a year older than he is, I'm the older brother. It's my responsibility to see things through. Mom didn't die right then, though ... she hung on.
She hung on a little bit longer so we wouldn't find her dead and she hung on just long enough for the doctor to say that there wasn't anything he could do, and then she just kind of smiled at us and died. I've never understood why. Some sort of sickness, I get that. I don't even know what she died of and really I don't want to know. If she was sick why didn't she get help? Why did she just let her body shut down like that? I don't understand, I can't understand...
Mom left just like dad did. No explanations. Just gone, almost overnight. Abandoned. The only consolation we had was that mom didn't want to go. We held on to her until the life left her body and the doctor gave a time of death and Winry was crying and Al was crying and ... fuck. Resembool's a small town, the wake was held in our house and it was almost a week until the funeral. It had been rainy for a few days after she died and they wouldn't be able to dig a grave that wouldn't collapse. She stayed in our house for a week. Granny Pinako forbade us from going home while her body was there. Alphonse couldn't stop crying. Winry cried a lot too, almost more than when the soldier came to tell her her parents weren't coming home. The house, when we went back to it, smelled like death for a long time. I don't think Al quite knew what the smell was, and I'm glad for that. I hope he's forgotten it by now. I never will.
I didn't care what Granny said. I went every day and looked at her in her coffin. She looked so peaceful, like she could just sit up and laugh and say 'wasn't this a horrible joke?' It wasn't a joke. It was real and that Sunday they buried her. That day, still in our Sunday best - it was the first time Granny Pinako had tied our ties and not mom, mine was a little crooked because I kept playing with it since no one told me not to - I told Al what I had been thinking about all week. I told him the plan I had concocted while staring at her face, now forever buried under our feet.
It seemed so perfectly innocent. We wanted to see her smile again. We wanted another hug, another laugh, another story before bed. So who cares if we break a few rules here and there, we're kids! We just wanted our mom back, how wrong could that be?