Amid a smattering of cleaning supplies, dirty rags and stuffed black garbage bags defiantly stood an old woolen couch. It was moving day again – for the sixth time in six years – and I was expertly emptying my small, limestone double-bungalow in South Minneapolis of all personal belongings.

The three-cushioned, brown plaid patterned sofa had a look as if it was poached from an old country cottage, with its simple design, utilitarian nature and worn armrests. It stood quietly in my dank, unfinished basement on a cold cement floor with exposed wooden beams above, a quiet yet haunting reminder of painful memories.

The couch had been in my possession for nearly six years, usually relegated to filling a corner of a seldom-used room. Long the centerpiece for gathering family members, it was now used for nothing more than a laying place for rumpled heaps of laundry.

At home, years before, the couch sat prominently in the family living room, a cedar-paneled, sun-drenched room overlooking the pond behind our pastoral dwelling in windswept western Minnesota. It was where we’d dine, watch television and gather to discuss the day.

It was also where my mother would spend her last days.

My mother made the couch her haven during her six-year battle with cancer. And in her final year, she spent nearly all of her time on the couch, too weak to come to the dinner table or to traverse the stairs to her bedroom. She used to lie there all day, plugged into a catheter filled with pain killers, filled with hope that she’d eventually beat the disease.

It was there she sat, while my father and I watched as her health and energy were slowly drained by the debilitating disease.

Eventually, the pain became too much for her, and on a cold January night she requested to be taken to the hospital. My father quickly packed a duffel bag full of my mother’s belongings, and calmly prepared me for bed. As he ushered her to the warmed van in our garage, my mother turned with a pain-ridden grin to assure me, her 12-year-old son, that she was just going in for “testing,” and would be back in the morning.

She would never leave. Seven days later, she died in the hospital with my father and me at her side. She walked away from life at age 43, much too early for a woman with her zest for life.

In the painful years that followed, my father and I would rarely sit on her couch, but it stood as a firm reminder of my mother, and its presence had a sort of comforting aspect, like it was full of her hope.

I could never bring myself to parting ways with the couch until that final day at the end of August.

As I walked out the front door of the apartment for the final time, the couch remained, alone in the basement, lit only by a sliver of incandescent light – a sad metaphor for what my mother must have been feeling in the waning twilight of her final hours.


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