The Goodbye That I Hated And Needed All At Once
Ug, this is hard to write. My beautiful, soft, kind, loving mom died. The body that held her ran out of energy and time and she slipped away. I’ve really struggled with writing this one. I wrote a lot recently and didn’t post it because I got tired, or a headache or just felt spent. I wrote about worrying about this being genetic, about severe dementia and the end of life and about trying to embrace being my mother’s daughter.
Our last weeks with Mom were difficult. We were waiting for this horrible, final thing to happen. And to know someone is dying and then just SIT and READ feels like you are the stupidest person alive. If someone is dying this is an emergency! You shouldn’t be SITTING and READING. You should be DOING and FIXING. This baffled my son and he was frustrated and angry with me for most of the week before his grandmother died. “Why aren’t we calling an ambulance? Why isn’t everyone giving her medicine? How does your brain break your body?”
But there was nothing left to do. Hospice came and confirmed what the nursing staff said- that Mom was dying and it would be a matter of days or hours. We watched her breathe, thinking that her most recent deep breath was the last breath we would see her take. We stared at her chest in the seconds where she took breaks from breathing- waiting to see if she would be granted another. We laughed together as siblings at our music choices while sitting together in her room. We drank tea and coffee and farted a bunch out of stress. We went home each night. Mom had done this too. When my Dad was in the ICU she went home each night and slept in her own bed. My sister reminded me of this on the one day that I just couldn’t leave.
The day that sticks out in my head is the day where I just really felt what was happening. I felt the true loss of Mom. I remembered HER- not this sick person in front of me that had been lost for years. But my mom, the one that so clearly wanted to love me and struggled through her disease to swim through the tangle and show that. The Mom that tried to write birthday cards and instead they were just words and a few cut up pictures glued on a paper. But the idea of love was there- I see that now, where as before all I could see was evidence of illness. On this day I just slowly paced and paced outside of Mom’s residence. I walked on this short nature trail so slowly that I eventually just stopped walking and laid down on the trail. I’m pretty sure if anyone had seen me they would have thought I had passed out there. I just cried and cried and talked out loud to Mom and Dad there- because somehow her spirit felt closer to me outside on the nature trail then it did inside next to her.
I went back inside and realized I really needed to rest before driving home. I pulled out two chairs and pushed them together, facing each other. I went in Mom’s closet and pulled out some of her sweatshirts to make myself a pillow and squished my tall self into the chairs to take a nap. In the warm afternoon sun, Mom and I napped together. Just for a moment, doing the same thing- resting for the journey ahead. And I felt like her daughter again- just taking a nap with my mom. It was quiet and simple. When the nurse came to check on Mom I signaled that she was okay (thumbs up) and that we were napping. She just smiled and walked away. She seemed to realize that this was my quiet moment and not a time for medicine, vitals and skin checks.
Mom passed away on October 19th after being on hospice for over 2 years, 7 1/2 years after diagnosis, about 9 years after the first symptom and 42 years of me having her as a mom. But those numbers don’t add up to what was lost. A while after Mom passed I got tired of calling people to inform them and just texted “My Mom passed away earlier today. I will miss her forever.”