- 14 January 1922 — 15 September 2008
This was my mother.
When she died, she was in severe distress. This was after a number of days in growing pain, after a few years of daily discomfort and a growing frustration with being capable of less and less.
I knew it was coming, I could tell. There were events that I knew would bring it about–my aunt dying last month, and years before that her sisters moving completely out of her reach, where each of them would suffer from the separation with their own personal sickness of loss. Alzheimer’s for one, cancer for the other. Leukemia was my mother’s last diagnosis, post-mortem. It was, apparently, in its nascent, turbulent acute stage–white blood cells all cytoblasts; red blood cells almost extinct. Like a rousing, futile, furious last ditch effort against an insurmountable invading virus. Death.
I always thought I’d be completely prepared, as she was 86 and she was in pain–I also knew, as she went along, that her very mild heart condition would turn into full blown heart failure. I even knew, about a week ago, when it had started to happen. There was a moment when the paramedics were taking her to the ambulance, our eyes locked and I realized in my bones that she would not be coming home, she was telling me goodbye, telling me she loved me, telling me that that was it. But even then I followed her to the hospital, feeling like I had time, hoping against all hope I’d meet her best doctor doing his rounds. I did meet him while walking in, then I heard him being paged to her room in emergency. And I knew.
She could not be stabilized, she went wildly down, then wildly up as one organ after another failed. Morphine calmed her and the monitor over her bed slowed till her blood pressure disappeared, the alarms sounding at first, and then silenced while every one of the displays turned into flat lines and question marks. Morphine masquerades as a legitimate painkiller but it’s the only euthanasia we can get away with, too much and everything causing the pain is crushed in its beneficent paralysis. And that was it. No more distress and no more pain but Holy Fuck, she was just gone.
I lost my mother about 10 years ago but somehow time hasn’t moved on from that time. I still think here almost every day. It was the hardest thing I ever went through. We were given 3 months from the diagnosis of colon cancer, and it was almost to the day.
It leaves this strange vacuum in your life and for a few months you will have strange dreams. It is natural, so dont think you are losing your mind. It is a way of coping with the loss. Let me know how it goes and I wish you strength and peace.
Thank you, Mike. It’s just over a month later and I think of her almost every moment I’m alone or not thinking about any particular thing. The dreams have been strange in that I’ve been expecting so many of them to be about her, but they haven’t been.
It’s amazing to me, though, how her death has caused such profound change in my family’s dynamic, I’m re-acquainting myself with my father and my brother in a way that never would have been possible before. Also, over the last month of public mourning–funeral, reception, memorials–so many people I haven’t seen in decades made contact with us again. Many of my childhood friends who’ve grown up and raised families of their own, all remembering my mother for the kind and openly generous person she was with them. I’d forgotten those times and her passing brought all of that back. Another one of my mother’s blessings.
I miss her like mad, and wish she would have been able to see all this happen when she was here.