LOSING MOM - Part 34

After assuring Lib and me that she would find us after talking to Mom, the chaplain hurried away down the hall, leaving the two of us sitting on the bench staring at each other in bewilderment.

“What the heck?” I scowled after her receding figure, watching until she disappeared around the corner. “I can’t believe this! Why would she wait so long to say something? What if we hadn’t been sitting here just now?”

It was, in fact, quite a coincidence that Libby and I were sitting where we were that day...I’d certainly never sat out on that bench before, and Lib would later assure me she never had either. Normally, if there was such a thing as normal in Hospice, we would wait for our lunch at one of the tables inside the cafeteria, if only to keep an eye on the somewhat grumpy cooks behind the counter to make sure they remembered we were there.

So I’m not really sure why we decided to wait out in the hall that particular day...maybe the cafeteria was really busy and there weren’t any open tables? Or, who knows, maybe the universe decided to give us a little nudge so we would be in that particular place at that particular time.

Because if we hadn’t been where we were, then the chaplain wouldn’t have run into us, and then we wouldn’t have known that Mom was in the possible throes of a spiritual crisis.

Which, in my humble opinion, is something pretty f...ing important for us to have known!

But it had been a whole week since the chaplain had spoken with Mom, and she hadn’t reached out to us once. Which really irked me because, honestly, how much nicer would it have been if she had sought us out, maybe offered to talk with us privately about her concerns? Maybe we could have asked her some questions about spiritual crises, even come up with some ways we could help Mom through it.

Sadly, though, rather than finding out our dying mother was having a spiritual crisis in a nice, quiet, pre-arranged meeting, we found out in the middle of a crowded, noisy hallway, and purely by happenstance.

A fact that made me madder than a hornet.

“Can you believe she just dropped this in our laps!” I fumed to Lib, my worry for Mom overshadowed by my irritation with the chaplain. “I mean, what are we supposed to do now? Just sit here and wait? I feel so helpless!”

“I don’t know,” Lib shook her head sadly, “I can’t bear thinking Mom is having a spiritual crisis! I’m not sure I know what that even means!”

I racked my brain to remember what I’d learned in my Hospice volunteer training about spiritual crises at the end of life, but it had been so long ago all that came to mind were big issues like unresolved family problems, or doubts about the purpose of life. Maybe for some it was a struggle with forgiveness, or questioning their religious faith.

But I didn’t think Mom had any issues like that although, if she did, she’d never shared them with me. There had been the recent breakup with her church that we’d all scratched our heads over, but Mom kept insisting it was just because she didn’t like the new minister, not because she was questioning her faith.

But what if Mom was questioning her faith? I fretted, suddenly worried we should have paid more attention. What if she just used the new minister as an excuse so she didn’t have to explain it to anyone?

Oh my god! My heart began thudding heavily in my chest as a new thought occurred to me. What if Mom was already having a spiritual crisis a whole year ago and we’d just been too caught up in our own lives to notice?

Guilt, heavy as lead, flooded my veins at the wrenching thought we’d missed something important when Mom had stopped going to church. Why hadn’t we asked more questions back then? I chastised myself. My sisters and I had definitely thought it was strange she’d taken such an instant dislike to the new minister, especially when she couldn’t really explain what it was she didn’t like. And we thought it even stranger when she wouldn’t give him another chance, announcing out of the blue she just wasn’t going to go to church anymore. It was so unlike our mother.

Could it be possible that we’d all been so worried about Mom’s physical health the past few years that we’d totally overlooked her spiritual well-being? And now here she was, having a spiritual crisis on her frigging deathbed, and the only person to help her through it was a chaplain she didn’t even know, and we didn’t even like?

“Maybe the chaplain’s wrong,” Lib said suddenly. “I mean, it’s not like Mom’s been able to talk very clearly the last couple of weeks. Maybe the morphine’s confused her, and whatever she said to the chaplain came out the wrong way.”

I nodded my head, thankful to have my spiraling, anxious thoughts interrupted. “It is weird that Mom would open up so easily about something so personal,” I agreed, adding peevishly, “especially to someone she’d never even met before.”

Growing up, I don’t ever remember talking to Mom about things like God and heaven, though she took us to church with her every Sunday, so there would have been plenty of opportunity. And except for her listening to my bedtime prayers every night, I can’t think of one time Mom and I talked about our spiritual beliefs, hers or mine, when I was younger.

Recently, though, and somewhat ironically, we had started to share our ideas about what happens after we die, but not once in any of our conversations did Mom lead me to believe she was questioning the existence of God, or Jesus, or Heaven. In fact, I’m pretty sure the words God, Jesus or Heaven never even came up.

Which, in hindsight, would actually be a little odd if Mom had been starting to question her Episcopal faith.

So maybe Libby was onto something. Maybe the spiritual crisis the chaplain sensed Mom was having didn’t have anything to do with Mom’s religious beliefs after all.

But if not that, was there something else in her life that Mom may have been questioning or worrying about? Maybe a choice she made that she was regretting, or something she’d done that she wished she hadn’t? I could only imagine the kinds of worries and doubts that might fill someone’s head when they’re dying, especially if, like Mom, you were dying really, really slowly.

Suddenly a thought popped into my head. Could it have something to do with Billy? I wondered, thinking about the baby Mom and Dad had lost to SIDS when he was only 4-months-old. Billy had been my parents’ second child, born just 13 months after Sallie, but 4 years before me, so he was always a bit of an enigma in my life - a brother I knew of, but would never know.

And even though I can’t remember Mom or Dad ever talking to me about what happened, I somehow seem to know the story. Maybe Sallie told me, or maybe I just made it up from bits and pieces I picked up here and there. Or maybe Mom or Dad did tell me and I just can’t recall.

In any case, the story I’ve had in my head all these years goes something like this:

Mom and Sallie were downstairs while Billy was taking a nap upstairs in his crib. Mom heard him crying but then he stopped, so she didn’t go up right away hoping, as any mother would, that he’d fallen back to sleep. When she finally did go up to check on him a little while later, she couldn’t wake him up. He’d stopped breathing.

What happened next I have no idea because, frankly, I was just never brave enough to ask. The truth is, I’m hardly brave enough to even imagine what happened next. If I try to picture Mom picking Billy’s limp body up from the crib my heart breaks into so many pieces I can’t bear to imagine any further. And because I don’t have to, I don’t.

But Mom did. She did have to bear, and then survive, the most impossible moment anyone could ever imagine - finding your baby dead in his crib. An impossible moment that is every mother’s worst nightmare, and one that must have haunted her the whole rest of her life. I know it haunts mine and it wasn’t even my moment.

Could it be haunting her now? I wondered, standing up to follow Lib into the cafeteria to pick up our lunch. I wished, not for the first time and definitely not for the last, that I’d had the courage to ask Mom to tell me about it, especially once I was a mother myself and could appreciate the impossible pain of losing a child.

Maybe if I knew more of the story, I lamented, I wouldn’t feel so helpless now. Maybe I’d know better if Mom ever blamed herself for what happened. Maybe she’s scared she somehow failed as a mother and God is going to judge her for it.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But as Lib and I settled into the sunroom across from Mom’s room to eat our lunch, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of my confident, feisty, maybe-a-little-bit stubborn mother second guessing herself like that. It seemed to me that if Billy’s death was going to cause her a spiritual crisis, it would have been when it happened, not 63 years later after the rest of her long and, what seemed to me at least, pretty happy life.

My thoughts were interrupted when the chaplain came out of Mom’s room and, catching sight of Lib and me, strode purposefully into the sunroom, stopping in front of us like a stern schoolmarm getting ready to address her unruly students.

“Who’s been talking to your Mom about energy?” she asked indignantly, peering over her glasses first at Lib, then at me.

And just like that, it wasn’t my mother’s spiritual crisis I was concerned about. It was my own.

To be continued...