Spring wasn’t spring this year. It wasn’t about new life – it was about watching my mother die. It was about helping my mom to fight, literally to the death. On the last Saturday of February, she wasn’t up for going out to dinner with us. By March 4 she was in the hospital for the first time; and just before dawn on May 8, 2022, Mother’s Day – she was gone.
I have started this post so many times – thinking I finally had the words. But the feelings overwhelmed my fingers. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t clear a space for the message to come through. In fact, I’ve just had to take a “cry break”. So today may not be the day, either, but I’m going to try.
Creating this post is important for a few reasons. The first being, Mom loved my writing…she would want me to process the loss this way. Another reason is when life is too much, God does tend to give me the words to clear it out. [and now I can’t think of a thing to say].
OK.
And finally, three deaths in less than a year, the deaths of three significant players in my life, is not something I can’t write about…quite the opposite. I must find the words to create the pictures that complete the feelings so I can live with and through these losses rather than allowing them to take my ability to breathe away.
My relationship with my mother was fraught with intense love, bitterness, disappointment, joy, undying support, hysterical laughter and hope. I couldn’t have added that last word, hope, until a few years ago – when she came to live with us. My husband invited her. I love my husband – and I warned him. He can’t say I didn’t warn him.
If you want to know if you have skills, throw yourself into a situation that requires them. Even if you don’t have them initially, if you’re brave and committed, you’ll develop them eventually. That’s the way I found out which of the life principles that I have been studying on and off for the last 34 years were my default and which of them were not quite yet at my disposal. I’m talking about Honesty, Tolerance, Love, Compassion, Brotherly Love, Patience, Forgiveness, Perseverance, Courage – among others.
I was painfully aware of the Courage it took for Mom to leave her hometown to come to the east coast to start over at 76 years. She had lost her beloved the year before and her health was such that living alone was no longer safe for her. I also knew that she was the other half of our provocative relationship – and although I knew she had unconditional Love for me, she was also quite sure she deserved more than most people were willing to afford her, especially her first born. How to show her that the invitation was sincere – and mutual. So, to her, designing/creating a suite for her on the first floor right off the kitchen was the first sign that the invitation was real!
Having read over this draft, again, I am aware of my inclination and resistance to writing about the whole of the last 4 years. Rather than detail the moments of growth, I’m opting to offer the biggest lessons. Because, often, the epiphanies of another person read like so much hysteria, rather than the soul changing moments they experienced. Suffice it to say, at least for this post, that after a tumultuous first year together, hard suggestions were made to Mom regarding her behavior and much discussion was had about my reactions to that behavior. Then, suddenly…
For those of you who may be familiar with the principles I refer to, you’ll recognize the word “suddenly” as describing a tipping point.
…suddenly we all, Mom, my husband and I, started to make adjustments. We started to listen differently. We started to approach each other more respectfully, to keep talking through difficult feelings – and take responsibility for our own actions and feelings.
Aye, there’s the rub…
Those fucking feelings. HA! In my experience all feelings are real – but they are not facts. Facts are usually easily identified, simple to inventory and often interpreted to justify our feelings. But Feelings are based on how relatively close we find ourselves to the things we want most in life and/or our predisposition to protect ourselves from the thing we think will kill us. Whether it’s disappointment, loneliness, change, loss, or challenge. Once we define our comfort zone, which changes with our moods, we will protect it with our lives (or at least our mental health/peace of mind). I have found the hardest work can be identifying how my feelings are misinterpreting the facts to keep myself stuck, to keep myself small and alone. Most of my breakthroughs have come when I was able to see the facts from an entirely new perspective.
During the last two years of her life especially, she worked so hard to open her understanding about facts v feelings and to develop, as Chuck C writes, A New Pair of Glasses with great successes and joy! But no matter how hard she worked, no matter how much writing, talking, reading or praying she did – she could not outrun 50 years of smoking. She could not will her lungs to health or her legs to feeling or strength. At the beginning of her emotional/spiritual transformation, I know she was scared that God brought her to us so she could heal internally and once she did, it would be her time to go.
Gratefully, she became less afraid of the inevitable and more excited about the change itself. I recently found, in her ‘God box’ a simple slip of paper, dated June 12 (2021), with a simple message in her handwriting: “I have forgiven myself”.
It took my breath away. All the years she had blamed herself for things she could not change – and denied the things she could, she had finally found the freedom she had long dreamt of by forgiving herself for her perfectly flawed being-ness.
She wasn’t wrong about the timing, really. Later that summer we had a wonderful celebration of her 80th birthday – a surprise event attended by her new dear friends, as well as my brother and her brother and his wife, from the Midwest. Then came Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day. Her illness was sudden and wholly debilitating…losing what remaining strength she had, but not her will to fight. During one of her last evenings at home, knowing the next day would mean another trip to the hospital, barely able to breathe or stand, she said to me, “I thought I’d get one more spring”.
We kept trying to plan a driving tour of the Cherry Blossoms (we have a park here that boasts more cherry trees than DC – and rivals our nation’s capital in majestic splendor in early April). Once that event had come and gone, we hoped to hunt for blooming azaleas (her favorite flowering plant). This was a longstanding mission for Mom, wherever she found herself at that time of year. In the end we would have settled for the explosion of the leaves on the trees as they came back to life after the cold, dark winter. We kept discussing the timing, the skills required before whatever facility she was in at that moment would allow me to drive her around in my own vehicle.
While she was alive for a large portion of the spring of ’22 – she was too sick to truly appreciate the blossoming of the world through her windows. She was trying not to focus on the horizon, where she saw the eternal sunset coming upon her – without the ability to fight or change the ending.
My brother and I were with her into the late afternoon of her last day, we simultaneously kissed her on either side of her forehead before we said good-bye, with promises of TWO VISITS the next day – to celebrate Mother’s Day. COVID had separated Mom and I for most of her last three weeks of life. So, two visits in one day was a luxury. COVID protocols required visitors to limit their time to 2 hours with each resident, in the hopes that they would somehow keep the deadly virus from overrunning their facility.
The next morning, before 8am, I saw a missed call from the hospice…I called back immediately to be informed she had passed early that morning, Mother’s Day. It’s still surreal to me…presents waiting to be shared, flowers to be placed in a vase, more time to love and laugh – our plans foiled by her mortality.
My brother and I know that she was with the two people she loved most on the earth in her last conscious hours. She was comforted by how much my brother and I adore each other – and knew she was not leaving us alone, but together. So we, together, are motherless, yet whole; Both suffering in our own way and grateful for the company.
Now the year of ‘firsts’ goes on…the first summer, the first 4th of July, the first theatre production, the first family gathering, etc. Just like in the first two weeks after her death, I want the time to slow down, while I try to figure out how to do this without her almost as much as I want to skip every special moment when she’ll be remembered as absent from something she would have loved, like reopening a wound that appears to heal. But that is not how time works. I’m learning to offer time it’s well earned respect and observe it’s effects on the people I love and the world I know. It brings to mind a startling passage from the sublime text of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood – Mom had delighted in a brilliant production I had the privilege to perform in for an extended run in Chicago, long, long ago:
“Time passes. Listen. Time passes.”
