Mom Is Still Paranoid
by V
My mother passed away last November. This is an incident that happened a night or two after she died. There are however a couple things to note first. My mother was disabled and would often call me in during the night to help her with whatever she might need at the time. One of the things she would often wake me up to deal with would be things she would work herself up to worrying about. You see she had been in a very bad trailer fire as a child, and as such had a phobia about fires. She would often eye the electric heater or any other ‘dangerous’ piece of equiptment, such as the power bars, she considered fire hazards, and then call me in specifically to deal with any dangers she would notice around them. This usually meant someone had left paper or a stuffed animal closer than she deemed safe.
A night or two after she passed found myself, my sister, and my four year old niece all sleeping across my mother’s bed. It was very late and I was sound asleep, when I woke to the feeling of some pressure against my chest. The feeling was as if someone was pushing in the middle of my chest with the palm of their hand, not a solid pressure but an actual push; like what you would do to wake someone up.
I blearily opened my eyes and tucked my niece’s hand under the covers, sleepily assuming it had been her hand, despite it being nowhere near my vacinity. Satisfied I closed my eyes to return to sleep. Almost immediately I was pushed again. I jerked open my eyes, and looked at my 4 year old neice, who’s hands were still innocently under the covers where I’d placed them. I whispered her name, in some half asleep reasoning that she must be awake and messing with me. Instead of waking up she mumbled something in her sleep: “Mum mum said shut the furnace off.”
That caught my attention.
I couldn’t reach the heater from where I was, so I poked at my sister and told her to turn off the heater. She blearily patted the controls until it shut off, tucked her hands back under her pillow and slipped back to sleep. Satisfied in that sleep logic sort of way that I had done what I was asked, I slipped back to sleep. Some time later the pressure woke me up again this time three sharp pushes. This time I called out my sister’s name, and again instead of the sleeper waking, she muttered in her sleep: “Mom said shut the heater off.”
That woke me up to the fact that the heater was on again. Apparently her blindly slapping at the top of the controls only managed to temporarily stop it. I yelled and woke her up (Well wake the Hell up and shut it off then.) more solidly and made her turn off the heater properly. As she did it this time I stretched over to ensure she was doing the right thing, and noticed the stack of tissues laying around the heater.
Just the sort of thing my mother would have worried and stressed over before waking me up to come deal with it.
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