LOSING MOM - Part 33
The Hospice chaplain, the same one I’d felt such a deep, immediate aversion to when she’d been in to see Mom the week before, had spotted Lib and me as we sat waiting for our lunch outside the Hospice cafeteria, interrupting our quiet conversation when she abruptly stopped in front of us.
“I was hoping I’d run into you,” she said in way of greeting. “I’ve been thinking about my conversation with your mom last week, and after talking it over just now with the rest of her team, well, I believe she may be having a spiritual crisis.”
Lib and I stared up at her blankly, both stunned momentarily speechless by her words. I mean, honestly, to hear, out of the f...ing blue, that your dying mother was having a ‘spiritual crisis’ was maybe one of the worst things anyone had ever said to me.
“What exactly do you mean?” I finally managed to ask nervously, “That sounds terrifying!”
“I think your mom is trying to work through something that she’s finding difficult to process. It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” the chaplain added quickly as Lib and I glanced at each other in alarm. “Just something I thought you should be aware of. I was actually on my way to see if she might be up to talk a little with me now.”
She peered down at us, her wire-rimmed glasses reflecting the overhead lights, making it hard to see her eyes. “Of course”, she added as an obvious afterthought, ‘if it’s okay with the two of you.”
What was it about this chaplain that I found so off-putting? From the moment she’d stepped into Mom’s room a week earlier I’d felt an edge to her presence that was unsettling. Maybe it was because Mom had been sleeping at the time and, rather than offering to come back when she was awake, the chaplain had plopped her bag down on a nearby table and pulled a chair up next to the bed.
Flustered, I’d tried to suggest another time might be better, but then Mom had woken up and before I knew it, I’d been shooed out of the room so they could ‘have a little chat.’
A ‘chat’, we were now learning, that had caused this chaplain some concern about the welfare of our mother’s spiritual well being.
Jesus. Why didn't she come to find me then? I wondered irately. I’d purposefully waited for her in the sun room outside Mom’s room that day, but she had somehow slipped out without me seeing her leave. At the time I convinced myself that was a good sign - that if she thought there was a problem she would have definitely come to find me.
But she didn’t, and now here she was, a whole week later, telling us that there was a problem! That our mother was having a spiritual crisis for god’s sake! And, even worse, that she wanted to go talk to Mom again!
“I’m not sure today is the best day,” Lib told her, looking over at me as I nodded in agreement. “Mom was pretty confused this morning when we got here. She’s asleep now.”
I’d flown in late the night before so hadn’t had a chance to get over to Hospice until earlier that morning. I’d been anxious to see Mom again after being away for a few days, but when I bent down to kiss her hello she hadn’t been able to remember my name. Or Lib’s. Or who we were married to. Although she did remember Sal and Paul were getting a puppy, and asked about him. Funny how the brain works!
I was reminded of the morning a few years earlier when I’d walked into the hospital the day after Mom had had a stroke and, giving me a big smile of recognition, my beloved mother had said, ‘Oh Louise! I’m so glad you’re here!’
Louise? Who the heck is Louise? I was terrified Mom didn’t know who I was, but not wanting to confuse her even more, I just kept smiling, holding back the tears welling up behind my eyes with all the willpower I could muster.
And believe me, it’s pretty hard to have your mother call you by some unfamiliar name, especially when said mother could remember everyone else’s name in the family, including our daughter's new boyfriend whom Mom had never even met.
I tried to comfort myself by imagining that maybe Mom knew me as someone named Louise in a past life, and even though she didn’t recognize me as Peggy anymore, she still recognized my energy as someone she knew and loved because, thankfully, she was always happy to see me.
And as the days went by and she continued to call me Louise, I realized that names just weren't that important in the end. I was absolutely confident Mom knew who I was in her heart, and for me that was all that really mattered.
Anyway, this time around Mom at least knew she was confused, but the more we tried to help her remember everyone’s names, the more frustrated she got.
“It’s okay Mom,“ I reassured her, smiling inwardly as I recalled my experience as Louise. ‘Names don’t really matter, do they? You know who we are in your heart, right?”
“I think so,” she agreed, ‘but I should remember.”
Poor Mom. Yes, she was definitely a bit confused that morning, and my instinct, and Libby’s, was to protect her at all cost from anything that might upset her more.
Like this chaplain, standing expectantly in front of Libby and me, waiting for our permission to visit our confused and dying mother.
The problem for me, though, and I think Lib, too, was that if Mom was, in fact, having a spiritual crisis, then she really needed someone to talk to about it. And quickly. In the past we would have reached out to the minister at St. Timothy’s, the church Mom had gone to for fifty years, but she had taken a visceral dislike to the newest minister there and had stopped going the year before. And though Lib and I had taken a similar dislike to this chaplain, there just wasn’t anybody else we could think of to call.
So, albeit a bit grudgingly, we told the chaplain that yes, if Mom was awake, she could try and talk to her. What else could we do?
Of course, in hindsight, I wish we'd had the time to think of something.
TO BE CONTINUED...