On Losing My Mom...

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On a few of the many nights I was staying with my mom this past month I brought my computer along.
I found for the most part this wrote itself over the course of a few very quiet periods in the wee hours of the night.
I'm still trying to get used to sleeping at night again. I keep picking up the phone to call my mom and talk then realize I can't.

Writing is the one way I express myself, though mostly unpublished someday I hope I will finish one of the books I've got on my computer. I tried to upload a word document but gave up after a while. So this is a very long post as it is the word document.

If you want to read my feelings and thoughts they follow this here.
It is personal and I hope it brings her to life for just a moment in your mind.
I doubt I'll ever stop missing my mother.

Laura

On Losing My Mom

I have the night shift with my mom because she can’t be left alone anymore.
Her cancer has spread. I stay awake all night.
Set up in the kitchen at the end of the table where as a family we laughed, fought, cried and ate. Where my grade school projects were planned and finished.
Where I did endless homework and set up the typewriter for countless papers.
Almost everything was done at our only table large enough to work at.
Where my friends sat and played board games and ate dinner over. I learned to cook and sew at this scarred wooden table. I listened to words of wisdom right here in this chair that I didn’t always take.

Later each of four grandchildren played and finger-painted at this old table. But it’s so very quiet here now. I can’t even imagine this table without my mother sitting across from me and I don’t want to.

It’s hard to listen to her coughing and see her getting frail from losing so much weight.
A woman that worked five days a week to raise 3 children when most other women stayed at home. A “get it done, do what you have to” original tough cookie with a heart the size of Texas. It is her heart that will give out before the cancer claims her. I guess it’ll be a small consolation but it seems so unfair to see this process happening.

Long before there was a term “super-mom” and all those people saying how stressful it is to be one, my mother already was doing it. However she didn’t complain: she just did. She did what was necessary at the time and what she had to do. She didn’t whine and complain about her lot in life because she was too busy living it.

It seems to me that my mother has always been a caregiver. Maybe not when she was a child, somewhat of a tomboy, carefree, curious and wild but certainly after she got married. She took care of her family all those years and then when the time came she took care of her own mother and husband.

I set up my computer in the kitchen so she can have some privacy and not feel that I’m hovering or interfering. She spent a lifetime being independent and gets angry when she feels she is being told what she can or can’t do. I don’t blame her at all for feeling that way. Sometimes her stubborn streak is hard to work with. She doesn’t like being a patient at all with people “fussing around her or at her.”

The hospital bed that hospice sent when she was unable even with our help to get up any longer helped. She could breathe better with the bed upraised. Even so she still coughs and really can’t swallow anything much. It’s a diet of mostly liquids: broth soup, Italian ices and thin puddings. Along with the tons of ice chips, which she loves because they make her throat feel better. Suddenly the icemaker in our new refrigerator that I thought at the time was an unnecessary luxury seemed a wonderful Godsend.

As she rests her breathing creates sounds that almost sound like she is singing to herself. A rhythmic and light melody. Recently when she’s asleep now she softly talks to herself or to others that share her dreams.

There are good nights where she reminisces and bad nights when she is exhausted and you can see the pain and the inevitableness of her fight. This one might be the only one she will lose.

I lightly rub her back when she coughs and gasps to gain her breath. When it passes and she lays back I place my hand on her forehead and talk to her. I massage her feet every night. I talk about my favorite memory from when I was little and she would read to me. I can picture the book and clearly hear her voice if I close my eyes. She sat on the edge of my bed and read from a well-worn copy of “Alice in Wonderland” to me. I was very young maybe all of five or six but I remember it well. I ask if she remembers how I endlessly, relentlessly asked her to read that book over and over again. She looks in my eyes for a moment and smiles at me. “Yes” she whispers “the tiny little book” and I answer, “Yes, with the tiny pictures.” She smiles again. “I loved the Jabberwocky poem and…” but she’s turned her mind elsewhere and is far away from me again.

Other times she’s just restless and angry with me no matter what I do. Swatting at me and fearful that we’re putting medicine in her ice chips. We’re not, but at that time she doesn’t believe me at all. The next day she smiles when I tell her I’ll try to freeze vodka in her chips if she wants me too and promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. “No,” she says quietly “white wine” smiling with just a hint of the humorous light in her eyes.

Sometimes she’s thankful and alert but not as much anymore. She talks to herself late in the night and dreams of trains, horses, people and places that only she understands or sees. Mostly she’s exhausted.

Very slowly the dawn comes. The sun rising in perpetual cycle while I sit alone and wonder what today will bring. Soon the birds are chirping and raising a clatter of different sounds that mix in with the gentle harmonic sounds of my mother’s labored breathing.

It’s very hard to see her like this. I already miss my mother, her former self. The one that cooked, cleaned and bustled about after losing her husband of 50 years. The proud grandmother that enjoyed her grandchildren’s visits and laughed along with them. She had a stubborn quality to her when she made up her mind and an incredible ability to make entire dinners out of nothing. She was thrifty and saved money. She didn’t have a credit card and never lived above her means. She could sew up a storm and often did. She made my prom dress and her office clothing. I learned a lot from her and owe so much of myself to her.

They don’t make them like my mom anymore. She took care of others without the narcissistic malaise that has seemed to wrap around later generations. She rarely complained though very often she would have had the complete right to.

As it gets lighter I sit wrapped in a blanket, with just the light of my computer in front of me. Another day beginning that I won’t really see. I’ll be sleeping until it’s time to get up and figure out what I absolutely have to do versus everything else that I won’t get to. For the most part people are opening a lot of canned soups in my home for dinner. The kitchen counter is scattered with the cans. It seems like ages ago that I was rearranging the upstairs. Now it looks like a scene from Pompei where I left everything exactly where it was when I simply vanished weeks ago. It strikes me that this is what would be left of me if I were to die tomorrow. Piles of disorganized boxes around the chair I’d been sitting in. A sobering thought and one that I decide to put out of my mind as best I can.

It’s important to me that my mother is comfortable. Later on I’ll take care of the tremor I’ve acquired from coffee, tea, stress, poor diet and lack of adequate sleep. I tell myself I’ll take care of myself, when I get the chance and put off self-caregiving for another day another time. My mother will come first. Of course someone else always comes first it seems that’s one of the few things I wish I didn’t learn so well from my mother’s example. Though I’ll never quite make as efficient a martyr as she could sometimes be.

My father died a tidy death. He got up one morning had breakfast then said he didn’t feel great and was going to rest for a little while longer. He had a massive heart attack and passed in his sleep. My mother found him. They had recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a small group of friends and family. My father was no piece of cake to live with by far and I have no idea how she did it. She should be nominated for sainthood for the day-to-day miracles she created from a sometimes very hard life. It’s so very unfair that she has to endure this illness. Unjust as life often seems to be that she must fail and give up so much of herself as she struggles each day and into the night.

I listen throughout the night to the many sounds this old house has. There’s a mouse that like clockwork every night around 3am rattles things around in the wall behind me. I find it strangely comforting. I caught sight of him once running towards the pantry. There’s a raccoon that makes odd noises just beyond the back porch. I hear the last few cars pass by around 2am and after that it stays quiet on the road until 4:30 when a very few early bird drivers make their way by the house. I know my husband is one of those that pass by Monday to Friday while it’s still night to most people. By 6am the traffic moves from a trickle to a more steady commute.

Mom’s refrigerator clicks when it runs and vibrates and hums until it finally stops. I never noticed it before. There’s a drip drip drip from the kitchen faucet no matter how forcefully I turn it off. The oil burner sounds like a hammer dropped into a metal barrel when it kicks on and then makes it’s hurricane like noise when the blower sends the heat out into the rooms before it clanks to a stop again.

Even with all the extraneous sounds I’m tuned into my mothers breathing and sounds of movement. I get up from the chair to check on her, every time I hear her moving. I tip toe quietly to make sure she’s all right. Sometimes she’ll rouse a bit and be aware I’m standing in the room and attempt to send me “off on my way” again with a wave of her hand and other times she gestures me over to talk, ask for tea, ice chips or to tell me she can’t seem to sleep.

The world is as oblivious to me and my troubles as I am to them right now. My mother always said no one is irreplaceable in life except in someone else’s heart. She is of course right. People come and go, the faces change and the world barely notices.

My mother was the glue that held our family together. It wasn’t a perfect life, but it was a life to be proud of and I know that she is satisfied now at the end from listening to the stories she’s been telling about her past to her children and grandchildren. She is tired now and mostly sleeps, the stories got further apart as she got weaker until they disappeared all together. That mischievous light in her eyes and any sign of laughter has all but vanished now into the night.

I know dying is a natural process of life. My mind realizes we all face our own deaths sooner or later and that my mother has had a full life in her 89 years, Amazingly she accomplished it all mostly on her own. But emotionally it’s a different story; my heart still feels like it’s being torn out through my nose piece by piece. I celebrate her life while facing her passing. I fear her leaving with every fiber in my body though I realize that’s a selfish thought. Even though our relationship wasn’t perfect I can’t imagine not having her around. My world will seem the same to everyone for all intent and purpose but for me it will have drastically and permanently altered.
I look over at my mom as she stirs. She’s wakened from a bout of pain and I realize I’m holding my breath once again. I help her turn onto her side and she settles back into the covers. She looks so small and helpless to me.

My brother comes up the sidewalk promptly at 8:30am carrying a hot pot of brewed coffee and his mug. My nightly shift is now over. I stay until the nurse visits at 9:30 and then I tuck my mom in and say goodbye with a kiss on the forehead. My brother and I talk quietly for a few moments in passing. The changing of the guard. I’ll be back again in the evening.

I step out into the day’s blinding light and all I can really think of is crawling into bed to try and sleep for a few hours. But even sleep seems elusive these days.

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My mother passed away quietly early one morning. I was there with her at the time. The time afterwards is a complete blur to me as I pushed myself through a wake, friends and family gathering and a small graveside service. Somewhere in the middle of all that was going on there was a Senior Class trip and a prom. I have no idea how I got through this past month but somehow I did. Maybe I’m far more like my mother than I realize.

There is still a lot to do and I dread going through her things. Today my son was home sick with a fever and I picked up the phone at least four or five times to call my mom to talk. I miss her so very much and know I always will.

Mostly I’m very glad we were able to keep my mother at home where she was comfortable. Where the last fifty-two years of her life unfolded around her. The around the clock attention and care we were able to give her along with the daily check in by the hospice nurse was better than any hospital or nursing home could have provided. I know that wherever my mother is now she is at peace. I am very proud to be her daughter.

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