The Horror... The Horror: An Autobiography by Rick Hautala

Author:Rick Hautala [Hautala, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2013-05-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“Bambi’s Mother’s Advice”

My mother took my sister, my brother and me to see Disney’s Bambi when were little. No, it wasn’t the first run. I’m not that old, but I won’t even pretend to remember how old I was. I must have been under five because I remember having a “Bambi” juice glass when we lived in Rockport. Of course anyone who has seen Bambi remembers the scene where Bambi’s mother tells him to “Run…run and don’t look back,” and then, after a dramatic pause, we hear a single gunshot and, although we know what it means immediately, Bambi doesn’t. Realization dawns…eventually.

My mother died in an accidental fall when she was in her late eighties. She was dragging a basket full of squash down into the cellar, moving down the stairs backwards a step at a time. That’s how she always did it. When I was home, I would of course help her, but only my father was home that day. We figure she must have miscalculated and thought she was on the cellar floor, when, in fact, she had one more step to go. She fell over backwards and hit the back of her head on the cement cellar floor so hard it dislodged her brain stem from her brain.

But she didn’t die right away.

Her heart kept beating even after she was airlifted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The family gathered to be at her bedside, but — of course — she never regained consciousness. We met with the doctors, who told us they could keep her alive indefinitely, but there was no hope. The nerves in her spinal column were basically disconnected from her brain.

She was gone.

So the family authorized her to be taken off life support. The nurse said her heart would only continue to beat for fifteen or twenty minutes.

It kept beating for over an hour. The nurse whispered to me that I’d better hope I inherited her cardiovascular system. I do hope that, but my mother’s “heart” — both literally and symbolically — is my strongest memory of her. If my father was the brains and brawn of the family, she was the heart and emotion. She was the one who taught me to value my dreams and what they tell me.

I was devastated by my mother’s death.

No one realized it at the time, but I quit writing for a full year. By this point in my career, I didn’t think I had the heart to write any more. I’d done what I could do; I’d had my high point (Selling over a million copies of Nightstone was no mean feat); and I’d had the bottom drop out of my career and my life. My mother was the center of our family, and without her I felt cast adrift.

So I stopped writing.

And nobody missed me or my writing.

Except for “The Texians.” Those friends were there for me, calling and writing and asking me how I was doing.

I was doing a lot worse than any of them probably knew.

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