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Cleaning blood stains out of a light-colored carpet may seem like a daunting task, but with the right tools and a lot of elbow grease, it is possible to make it seem as though the blood was never there. First, get some cold water and an absorbent cotton towel. If the blood forms a trail from the couch where your mother sleeps to the front door, start at the first, and largest stain – the one likely formed when she stood up to call an ambulance while blood pooled around her feet. Start by soaking this area with cold water, and wait a minute or two for it to soak in.

The phone at my sister Molly’s house in Texas rang only a few times before she picked it up. It was two or three in the morning – I don’t exactly remember which – and her voice sounded rough and older than it does when she’s not woken from a dead sleep. “Mom’s in the ER,” I said. I remember feeling like I couldn’t catch my breath all the way, so everything I said was in phrases, fragments of terrible news, like ripped up newspaper with just a few words on each strip. “She had another heart attack.” She didn’t break down – we don’t do that – but her voice went up an octave. Maybe she was squeezing her sleeping husband’s hand. Maybe she hadn’t even opened her eyes yet as a told her the details in layers. “They told me they ‘lost her’ in the ambulance. I got here maybe ten minutes after the ambulance. They brought her back. In the ambulance.” I could see her from where I stood, surrounded by volunteer EMTs – people she worked with in our tiny rural town, where she was the deputy city clerk. A few of the EMTs were fellow city employees, but all of them were well-known to her. Their faces read panic and confusion – old ladies breaking their hips and teenagers smearing themselves across the highway with stomachs full of liquor are apparently not enough to inure one from being afraid that you might make a mistake and kill your friend. I briefly worried that she would be embarrassed that her underpants were showing. I thought of going back in there and pulling her nightgown back down. I didn’t.

After you have allowed the area to soak for a while, take your cotton towel, lay it upon the stain, and beat your fists on it, over and over. Do not rub; that will work the blood in deeper to the fibers, and then there is no way at all to pretend it wasn’t there. Blot the stain forcefully – don’t be afraid to stand up and use your heels. If need be, reapply more cold water and start again.

She was being taken to a hospital in a town forty miles away after they had stabilized her in our local ER – a “bandaid hospital,” some people in town call it. As I sat in the ER waiting to follow the ambulance there, my grandma walked in. Her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying. She had her purse clutched tightly in her hands. “Hi honey,” she whispered to me as she came in, as though we were in a church. Or at a wake. She only calls me “honey” when she’s very upset or when I’m doing something like getting married or having children. She sat down next to me and asked me questions about what had happened in that same hushed tone. Out of her white old lady purse she produced a crumpled Kleenex and with it, savagely wiped her eyes and nose, almost as though she was angry with her tears and snot for being so rude and invasive. Later I wondered what secret tears she had mopped away with that same wadded up tissue, and when, and where.

Continue soaking and blotting each stain as you come to it, making sure to remove as much of the moisture from the carpet as you possibly can. This can be a very time-consuming process, so it helps if the house is totally empty of people other than yourself. The silence will help you focus on your job, which is getting the carpet clean. That’s the most important thing. Stay focused.

At the larger hospital, she was hooked up to a variety of cardiac monitors. We stayed only long enough to make sure she was okay and to talk to the doctor. He said a lot of things. She’d had a heart attack, obviously. She’d flatlined in the first ambulance, they’d shocked her heart to get the rhythm back. The trip to this hospital had been uneventful. Her face was the color of pencil lead incompletely erased away, as though you hadn’t pressed hard enough on the paper. They were going to do an angiogram, see what damage had been done. My dad was still on the road, somewhere in Georgia, probably, delivering a load of cookies or peanuts or lawn chairs or whatever – “call me right away after you talk to the doctor.” I had to wait until we were away from the sensitive monitoring equipment. We waited as they took care of the business of admitting her, completing their assessments. When they let us in to see her, she was groggy. She joked about wanting a cigarette. My grandma took her Kleenex out again.

The key to successfully removing blood stains is to do it as quickly as possible. Letting it sit for a long time makes the stain much deeper and harder to remove. The faster you can get to the stain, the better the results. Don’t be tempted to use hot water; it will only aid in setting the stain.

A few weeks later, she came home. They gave her home care instructions. They gave her a “stop-smoking” binder. After her first heart attack, ten years earlier, she’d stopped smoking for awhile and then surreptitiously started again. I caught her more than once before she finally came clean. I remember feeling furious and helpless in my fury, because there was nothing I could do or say to make her stop. She had gotten “better” and wanted to pretend as though it had never happened, I think. Who wants to dwell on the fact that they’ve had a heart attack at forty-three? Blot it out of your mind.
This time, the angiogram knocked cholesterol from her artery loose and sent it floating gently through her bloodstream, until it stopped and formed what is known as an atheroembolism in her kidney. Shortly thereafter, her kidney began to fail, and the embolism choked off the blood supply to the tissue near it, causing a large wound on her flank that opened from the inside out. When it surfaced and broke open, she woke from sleeping on the couch to find herself drenched in blood. Another ambulance ride, another trip to a larger hospital, another grave discussion with a nameless doctor. She didn’t lose her kidney, but she had a severe wound and required hospitalization and treatment for a long time. I cleaned the blood off the carpet and decided to keep a Kleenex in my purse.

In the best of cases, most of the blood stain will disappear; however, you should be prepared to have the carpet removed and discarded if you simply cannot fully eradicate the damaged areas. After all, carpet is easily replaceable. Another alternative is to simply live with the faded outline of the large areas where your mother’s blood once pooled around her feet.