When my mother died, I was only 6 or so. She seems a distant, hazy memory to me now.

During the harvest, my mother cut her hand on a rusty scythe blade when she tripped over a rock and fell her hand across the blade.

Father was off for his yearly qualifications at our Stanitsa’s assigned division, and he wasn't here to see she tended to her wound properly.

My mother, from what others share about her, cared too much for others and not enough for herself.

Others would praise this, but I lament this because that killed her.

She worried too much if we had good harvest she ignored herself and she died. Father said it was Tetanus that claimed her- Lockjaw.

Doctors could do nothing.

I cried fiercely when Father barred me from seeing her on her sickbed. I grew furious.

For my mother, whenever Father was away, I took it upon myself (in my own naively childish imaginings) as her protector. Shouldn't I be there when she was sick?

In my mind, I had little idea of death. I knew it existed, and that meant you never saw someone who died again.

But the reality of my mother being claimed didn't reconcile with my logic. As a child, I assumed as I grew, my parents would remain the same- not even greying or wrinkled.

Mother won't and can't die, I argued with my 6 year old self. I thought I could somehow fend off the illness or protect her from dying. Such is a child's logic.

This determined vow renewed my wrath, and I stormed through the house, rammed my child-self into her room.

She laid on the bed, her back arched in an impossible spasm. Her face was locked into gaping, cross-eyed, like some suffering icon or terrified sculpture of some about to be punished by some monster or crushed by rocks.

Seeing her like that tore my mind apart. To this day, I can’t reconcile an evil like Tetanus exists.  

My Father leapt from his vigil on her bedside and soundly smacked me on the head as he chased me out of the room.

"She begged me not to let you see her like this! That's why I told you not to come in here!" My Father hissed sharply through his clenched teeth. As I remember now, he hissed more in pain than anger.

She died. Her body already locked in that position later on the next morning.

An old widow neighbor and her daughters prepared my mother's body and she was buried.

Where or how my little brother fared, I can’t recall. Kolya was only 2 at the time. All I remember his wailing as the dust swelled in little swirling clouds from the shovel strokes as our neighbors buried the coffin in the earth.

No sooner had the last shovelful of earth had been pat down, and the priest bobbed away slowly like a cap floating in the river, I tore from my Father and ran into the barn. I cried the night there.