“Please go directly to UC Davis Medical Center,” the voice on the other end told him.
“What’s going on?”
“That’s all the message says.”
Suddenly panicked, he jumped into a limousine—no cabs were available—to take him to a friend’s house, where he’d left his car for the week.
He was two hours from Sacramento.
After an hour, a soft-spoken man wearing a suit came out to greet us.
“Mr. Sparks?”
We all rose, wondering if he was the doctor. He said that he wasn’t.
“I work with the hospital as a counselor,” he said. “I know this is hard, but please come with me.”
We followed him into a small waiting room; we were the only family in the room. It seemed it had been set aside for us. It was oppressive; I felt my chest constrict, even before he said the words:
“Your wife has suffered a cerebral hemorrhage,” he said to my father. His voice was gentle and ached with obvious sympathy.
Tears welled again in my father’s eyes. “Is she going to be okay?” my dad whispered. His voice began growing softer; I could hear the plea contained within it. “Please . . . please . . . tell me she’s going to be okay . . .”
“I’m so sorry,” the man said, “but it doesn’t look good.”
The room began to spin; all I could do was stare at him.
“She’s not going to die, is she?” I croaked out.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again, and though he stayed with us, I don’t remember him saying anything else. All I remember is suddenly reaching for Cathy and my dad. I drew them tight against me, crying as I’d never cried before.
Dana had gotten the call; she was boarding the next plane to Sacramento. I called a couple of relatives and told them what was happening; one by one, I heard them burst into tears and promise to be there as fast as they could.
Minutes crawled by, as if we were inhabiting a time warp. The three of us broke down and tried to recover again and again. An hour passed before we were able to see my mom. When we went into the room to see her, oxygen was being administered and she was receiving fluids; I could hear the heart machine beeping steadily.
For just a moment, it looked as if she were sleeping, and despite the fact that my mind knew what was happening, I nonetheless grasped at hope, praying for a miracle.
Later that evening her face began to swell. The fluids were necessary to keep her organs from being damaged in the event we would donate them, and little by little, she looked less like my mom.
Some of the relatives had arrived, and others were on the way. All had been in and out of the room but no one could stay very long. It was unbearable to be with my mom because it wasn’t her—my mom had always been so full of life—but it seemed wrong to stand in the hallway. Each of us drifted back and forth, trying to figure out which alternative was less terrible.
More relatives arrived. The hallway began to crowd with friends as well. People looked to each other for support. I didn’t want to believe what was happening; no one wanted to believe it. Cathy never left my side and held my hand throughout it all, but I felt myself constantly being pulled back to my mother.
When no one was in the room, I entered and closed the door behind me. All at once, my eyes welled with tears. I reached for her hand and felt the warmth I always had. I kissed the back of her hand. My voice was ragged, and though I’d already cried for most of the afternoon, I simply couldn’t stop when I was with her. Despite the swelling, she looked beautiful, and I wanted—with all my heart and soul, and more than I’ve ever wanted anything—simply for her to open her eyes.
“Please, Mama,” I whispered through my tears. “Please. If you’re going to come out of this, you’ve got to do it soon, okay? You’re running out of time. Please try, okay . . . just squeeze my hand. We all need you . . .”
I lowered my head to her chest, crying hard, feeling something inside me begin to die as well.
Micah arrived, and as soon as I saw him I burst into tears in his arms. Dana arrived an hour after Micah did, and had to be supported as she moved down the hallway toward us. She was wailing; hers were the tears of someone not only losing a mother, but her best friend as well. In time, my brother and I led her into the room. We’d warned her about the swelling, but my sister broke down again as soon as she saw how bad it had become. My mother looked unreal, a stranger to our eyes.
“It doesn’t look like mom,” she whispered.
Micah held her tight. “Look at her hands, Dana,” he whispered. “Just look at her hands. Those haven’t changed. You can still see mom right there.”
“Oh, Mama . . .” she cried. “Oh, Mama, please come back.”
But she couldn’t respond to our pleas. My mom, who had sacrificed so much in her life, who had loved her children more than any mother could, whose organs would go on to save the lives of three people, died on September 4, 1989.
She was forty-seven years old.
CHAPTER 13
Three Weeks With My Brother
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
February 6
After two days in Angkor we flew back to Phnom Penh, this time for a tour of the Holocaust Museum and a trip to the Killing Fields.
The museum is located in downtown Phnom Penh, which had been seized by the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, hoped to create a perfect communist state, and evacuated the entire city. A million people were forced into the countryside. With the exception of Khmer Rouge soldiers, whose average age was twelve, Phnom Penh became largely a ghost town.
With the departure of U.S. forces from Vietnam and no other country willing to intervene, Pol Pot began his bloody reign. His first act was to invite all the educated populace back into the city, upon which he promptly executed them. Torture became a way of life and death for thousands. In time, to save the cost of bullets, most of the executions were carried out by striking the victim on the back of the head with thick bamboo poles. Over the next few years, more than a million people were killed, either through enforced hardship, or executions in what are now known as the Killing Fields.
On the flight, Micah and I anticipated our arrival with a degree of ambivalence. Though we wanted to see both the museum and the Killing Fields, our excitement was tempered by our apprehension. This, unlike so many of the sites, wasn’t part of ancient history; it was modern history, home to events that people want to forget despite knowing that they never should.
From the outside, the Holocaust Museum looked unremarkable. A two-story, balconied building set off the main road, it resembled the high school it had originally been. But belying its innocuous appearance was the sinister barbed wire that still encircled it; this was the place where Pol Pot tortured his victims.
Our guide, we learned, had attended school there, and it felt disconcerting, almost surreal, when he pointed to his former classroom, before moving us to the exhibits.
They were a series of horrors: a room where they used electricity to torture victims; other rooms featured equally horrific devices. The rooms hadn’t been altered since Phnom Penh had been reclaimed, and on the floors and walls, bloodstains were still visible.
So much that we saw that day seemed beyond belief; the fact that most of the Khmer Rouge were children was almost too appalling to contemplate. We were told that the Khmer Rouge soldiers dispatched their victims without remorse and with businesslike efficiency; children killing mothers and fathers and other children by striking them on the back of the head. My oldest son was roughly the same age as the soldiers, which made me sick to my stomach.
On the walls were pictures of the victims. Some pictures showed prisoners being tortured; others showed the bodies unearthed in the Killing Fields. In either corner of the main room, there were two small temples that housed the skulls of those victims who’d been discovered in the camp after the guards had fled. On the wall was a painting of a young boy in a soldier’s uniform, striking and killing a victim in the Killing Fields. The artist, we learned, had lost his family there.
No one on the tour could think of anything to say. Instead, we moved from sight to sight, shaking our heads and muttering under our breath. Awful. Evil. Sad. Sickening.
More than one member of the tour had to leave; the intensity was overwhelming.
“Did you lose anyone in your family?” I finally asked the guard.
When he answered, he spoke steadily, as if he’d been asked the question a thousand times and could answer by rote. At the same time, he couldn’t hide a quality of what seemed almost stunned disbelief at his own words.
“Yes, I lost almost all of them. My wife, my father, my mother. My grandparents. All my aunts and uncles.”
“Did you have any siblings?”
“Yes,” he said, “a younger brother.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since the war. He was a member of the Khmer Rouge.”
We traveled to the outskirts of Phnom Penh and turned toward the Killing Fields. On either side of the dirt road were run-down houses; halfway up the street was a garment factory, and dozens of women were clustered outside, sitting in the dirt eating lunch as we passed.
Impossible to recognize unless you knew the location, the Killing Fields appeared as a ditch-strewn field, remarkably similar to the rest of the countryside we’d passed. It was far smaller than I imagined it would be—maybe a hundred yards to each side. In the center, the only recognizable feature was a memorial temple to honor the dead.
Over the next hour, we were led from one spot to the next; this was where a hundred victims were discovered; in another spot two hundred victims were found, over here, four hundred. In another spot, we learned that the skeletons unearthed had been buried without their heads, so it was impossible to know how many had been unearthed. In this particular field, we learned that thousands had died; precise figures are impossible to know with any certainty.
Micah and I simply wandered in silence, feeling sad and sickened. Eventually, we were led to the memorial temple and went inside.
The temple, white in color, was ten feet to a side, and roughly forty feet high, making it look like a rectangular block stood on end. We didn’t know what to expect, but what we found left us paralyzed. Running up the back wall to the top of the temple were glass-enclosed shelves, stacked with thousands and thousands of skulls.
On our way back to the bus, Micah summed up my own feelings in three simple words.
“This was hell.”
In the strangest juxtaposition of the entire tour, one that left me feeling off balance for the rest of the day, we went from the Killing Fields straight to the Russian Market for a few hours of frivolous shopping.
Cambodia, like many Asian countries, has perfected the art of piracy, and the Russian Market was a building crowded with hundreds of vendors, selling everything from pirated DVDs to pirated clothing. DVDs cost three dollars, jeans supposedly from the Gap went for half that.
The market was crowded; it seemed that every tourist visiting the country had heard about the place and had decided to visit at the same time. Despite the fact that most of our tour group had ample financial means and could afford the real items back home, most everyone left the market with a bagful of bargains.
On our last night in Phnom Penh, there was no cocktail party, so we were encouraged to make reservations at one of the hotel restaurants, since our hotel boasted some of the best food in Cambodia. Micah and I, naturally, forgot to make them, and ended up eating at one of the casual dining spots in the hotel. It was nearly empty, and we finished our meal in half an hour.
Although initially disappointed, we ended up being pleased by our meal. As fate would have it, everything went wrong in the kitchens that night. Everyone who’d made a reservation wound up having to wait hours for their meal. Ovens broke, cooks hadn’t shown up, meals came out wrong—Murphy’s law was in full force. Appetizers took an hour and a half to reach the table; the main course followed two hours later. While in some circumstances that wouldn’t have bothered people, we’d been on the road for thirteen days. People were tired and we had to rise early for our flight to Jaipur the following morning. On a night when everyone was looking forward to getting eight hours of sleep—as Micah and I did—most got less than five.
In our room, Micah and I were watching the Croc Hunter again. Along with CNN, The Crocodile Hunter was the only English-language show we’d been able to find. Every time we’d turned on the television—no matter what country we were in—Croc Hunter was always on. By Cambodia, it had become something of a long-running joke—by our reckoning, it was the most widely watched show in the world.
“Oh, isn’t this snake a beauuuuuty,” Steve Irwin, the ever enthusiastic Australian host, was saying. “Look at the colors. Oh, she’s magnificent, isn’t she? This little beauty is dangerous—one bite can kill a dozen men!”
“The guy is nuts,” Micah commented.
“He’s always nuts,” I said. “My kids love to watch him.”
Micah was quiet for so long, I thought he’d begun to doze. When I glanced over at him, however, I saw he was staring at the ceiling.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
It was a long moment before he answered. “What we saw today. Earlier this morning. The museum, the Killing Fields.”
“It was awful, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. When he spoke again, his voice was subdued. “It just made me feel sad. Sad for the people here, sad about the world. Sad about everything. And empty, too. It was all so pointless. Things like this shouldn’t happen.” He hesitated. “It reminded me of how I felt after mom died.”
I glanced over at him, not altogether surprised at his comment. Whenever either of us were sad, our conversation always returned to the topic of our family.