Today, She Is. Molly Miltenberger Murray

generals and charmed a European prince.

      These days I am waking up on a kitchen counter, and I close my eyes so they won’t know that I am awake because I don’t want to talk. The room closes around me like a curtain, like I am a child squinting out from under the covers, trying not to be seen by the babysitter. People move through the shadowed whiteness of the plastic-smoothened room. Here I am, peering out from under the blankets at them, and they don’t even know it. Bright white people dressed in white dress-suits, the kind from Dillard’s that old ladies wear with gold jewelry, stop whispering in the background and move closer, so close that I know they’ll pinch my shoulder like an old man, and then so close again that I realize I’ve closed my eyes — so I open them again and up goes the room.

      After the war, Mere went back to Tulane to get her masters in biochemistry. When she ducked out of the program to get married, her professor railed at her — you’ll have eight children and you’ll deserve it for leaving! Guess I will! Said Barbara. And she left to marry Henry, and had eight children. My father is the youngest.

      August 2, 2002

      Dear Molly,

      Today, your brain pressure is sticking around 10, which is good! You have an ever so slight fever, but not a bad one. I heard you opened your eyes and looked around today, but they couldn’t tell if you could see or not. You are able to move and crossed your feet and such. They hope to take you off the sedative slowly and have you wake up! Love ya.16

      I remember floating at the level of Daddy’s head at the wake, seeing my grandfather in a box. It was the first time I had ever seen Daddy cry; I could not bear it. People think there is no way that I could remember Poppy; he died when I was one and a half. But he called me Molly Ellen. I remember him catching me with his feet, tickling me from his Laz-Y-Boy by the door, teasing us cousins on the front porch, and how he looked in his box at the funeral.

      Some people remember every moment of being in a coma, not being able to speak, the trap, the muzzle of silence. One gentleman lived for 23 years trapped within himself, clinically dead, until a physician worked with him and he communicated that he was alive beneath it all, trapped, trapped. He cannot get out. He cannot get out — 23 years. Now he is writing a book by signaling.

      What is it like? Not horrific. It is a string of real-to-life, realer-than-life, dreams, bringing me back to places that I haven’t been to in years. I am ten years old and find a dumpster with a bear in it in Grand Lake, Colorado. I am four years old and cross a bridge over the monkey house of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.

      Passing through hallways and tunnels of darkness and light, falling down a hole of life like Alice in Wonderland.

      Mere’s funeral was in the spring in the Abbey, which always reminds me of Easter. At the wake, my sister younger fought my third cousin because she said her shoes were prettier. My cousins and I played cards behind the curtains until we were too noisy and attracted an aunt, and I cried at the graveside.

      At Aunt Dolly’s funeral — that woman was a saint — her daughters asked us to kiss her cheek. A band broke out into When All the Saints Come Marching In when the pallbearers carried her up the aisle, and we all sang along and ate cake with blue frosting.

      I almost died too. But — I lived. I was 4, but now I am 15, again, oddly enough, and starting over, against the odds. Despite the odds. The hospital calls me the miracle girl. I am a miracle.

      All the time — every five, ten waking minutes, they tell me the story again and again. I shall not die but live: and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not given me over to death. I was crushed by a flying boat and here I am. Life is a paradox that doesn’t fit in my hatbox, and death is only the beginning of it.