LOSING MOM - Part 51

What I would give to go back and slow myself down that day.  To have taken some time, after I hung up with Sal, to sit in Mom’s living room, surrounded by all her beautiful things, and tried to feel her presence, rather than rushing out of the apartment in a mad dash the way I did. I wish I’d taken a moment when I climbed into her car to sit in its familiar, unpretentious momness, and tried to talk to her, rather than obsessing like a crazy person about talking to John and the kids in the right order. Why was I rushing? Why was I so frantic to get over to Hospice when Mom wasn’t even there anymore? Why didn’t I remember what I knew deep down in my soul - that death wasn’t an ending but a transition, so Mom wasn’t really gone?

I suppose I was just trying to get some sort of control over an otherwise uncontrollable situation and by rushing around and fretting over who to call first I felt like I was doing something. All I know for sure is when Sal told me Mom had died, my mind started racing so fast my body had no choice but to start moving too, just to keep up. There was a whooshing in my head, as though my thoughts were caught in some kind of whirligig, spinning them around so fast I could barely register one before another took its place, their collective force propelling me forward out of the apartment, into the car, and over to Hospice. 

And though I’m sure it was that urgency to do, rather than be, which allowed me to put one step in front of the other that long, overwhelming day, it also kept my thoughts scattered, my mind focused on everything and nothing at the same time. Most of my memories of that morning are jumbled together, like a giant collage where all the photographs are overlapping each other so it’s hard to pick out just one. If I look closely a few of the pictures stand out, but mostly it’s just a mishmash of images all blurred together. 

Similarly, there are a few memories I can see clearly from that day, but they’re really just snippets of seemingly inconsequential moments, at least at first glance. The big things, the things I would think I’d remember, that I want to remember,  are all too blurry to make out. I wish they weren’t. I wish I could recall everything exactly as it happened, so maybe I might understand how I could forget, on the day I needed to remember the most, that even though Mom had died, she was still very much around me. 

I wish I hadn’t forgotten. I wish I’d remembered to look for her.

                                                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Somehow I made my way into Hospice that morning, though I have no recollection of parking the car, or walking through the heavy, wooden door of the main entrance, the same stupid door I’d struggled to pull open so many times the past six weeks. I hated that door, silently cursing the person who designed it every time I went through, so I’m a little surprised I don’t remember going through it for the last time.  But I must have, because there I was, standing at the reception counter, exchanging sad smiles with the kind-faced volunteer behind the desk. Did she know? I wondered, picking up the pen to sign the guest log. She and I had exchanged so many sad smiles over the weeks, it was hard to tell if this one was different, but she didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either. 

I wrote my name down in the register, my hand pausing over the space where I would normally put Mom’s name. The whooshing sound in my head got louder, and I couldn’t think what to do, unsure if it was possible to be visiting someone who was dead. But leaving it blank didn’t seem right, either, so I quickly scribbled in Kay Ball, Room 102.  Filling in that guest log day after day had been one of the things I dreaded most, reminding me as it did every morning just how long Mom had been there, how long I had been there. The monotony had seemed endless, until it wasn’t.

Walking down the long corridor to Mom’s room, I purposefully kept my eyes straight ahead to avoid looking into the other rooms and seeing any empty beds of the people who may have died the night before. Like signing the guest log, I’d dreaded seeing those beds every morning, and their constant reminder that one day it would be my mom’s that would be empty. Now that day had come, and I didn’t want to know if anyone else had died, that Mom was just one among many. I wanted her to be the only one. So I kept my eyes focused on the hallway ahead to make sure that, at least in my mind, she always would be.

I passed by the nurse’s station, and the two aides behind the desk fell silent when they saw me, my throat tightening when one of them, catching my eye, put her hand to her heart. I was grateful for the aide’s kind gesture but also felt a little flash of self-importance from her attention. I'm ashamed to admit, there was something a little heady in being the grief-stricken daughter whose mother had just died.

That feeling was short lived, though, eclipsed as it was a few moments later by a piercing stab of anguish when I saw the little rose card next to Mom’s name plate outside her door, the discreet Hospice code for ‘deceased patient.’ It had always seemed like such a sweet, subtle way of letting people know someone had died, but in that stark moment, poised as I was to walk through the door of my own deceased person’s room, that square, white card with the pretty rose painted on it was anything but subtle. It screamed death at me so loudly my heart began to pound, its presence on my mother’s door at once real and impossible at the same time. The whooshing in my head became a roar, and I crossed into the room.

But from there it’s a blank. As clear as some pieces of memory are up to that point, I have no recollection of what happened next. Sal was there so she told me what I did, but even so, I can’t pull up even the tiniest glimmer of any of it. Where did my mind go when I walked through the door into Mom’s room? When I try to remember, it’s like looking at a blackboard that’s been totally erased.

According to Sal, I walked into the room with purpose, stopping first at the side of Mom’s bed to give her forehead a quick kiss, before striding over to the bank of windows where I pushed one open a crack. I’m not at all surprised I did this - years earlier when my friend Wendy was dying in the hospital and another friend and I were there to say goodbye, her nurse had cracked open the window in her room, telling us it would ‘help Wendy’s soul get to heaven faster’. I’d loved the idea of Wendy’s soul flying free out the window of that sterile hospital room she’d been locked in for so many days, and I guess it stuck with me, though it’s not something I’ve consciously thought about since. Seeing my mother’s dead body lying in her hospital bed must have stirred up that long ago memory and, not wanting Mom’s soul trapped in that hospice room for one more second, I opened the window to let it out.

Memory can be so fickle. How can I not remember opening that window, or kissing my lifeless mother’s forehead, but can remember standing in the sunroom a few minutes later with Sal while Martin and the aide got Mom’s body 'ready’?

“This feels so unreal,” I said, pacing around the room, my footsteps loud and echoey on the flagstone floor as I tried not to think about what was going on in Mom’s room.  “Was it peaceful at the end?” I asked Sal, trying to distract myself. 

“I wasn’t actually in there,” she confessed, surprising me. “Martin was with her. I’d just stepped out for a second to make a quick call.”

A ripple of relief swept through me. Selfish as it may sound, if all three of us couldn’t be with Mom when she died, I was grateful none of us were. The balance between my sisters and me was precarious enough, shifting as it had one day to the next as we’d struggled the past few weeks with the reality of losing our mom. If Sal had experienced those last few moments of Mom’s life and Lib and I hadn’t, the scale would have seemed forever tipped in her favor, at least in my mind. It may be childish, but the insecure younger sister in me would have felt like Mom loved Sal more, that she was more special. 

So for me it was definitely better that none of us were there. And whether it was merely chance, or some higher power orchestrating the whole thing, Mom had somehow picked the perfect moment to finally let go. Sal was there, but not there, so Lib and I never had to feel badly that we weren’t. 

Martin stuck his head round the corner. “We’re all set,” he told us with a soft smile. “Take as much time as you need, all day if you want. There’s no rush at all. Just come find me when you’re ready.”

Taking a deep breath, I followed Sal back into Mom’s room, wondering as I trailed behind her if it was possible that we could ever be ready for what was going to happen next. 

To be continued...