The Never Normal

My mother & Boo’s grandma, who adored him above all else in this world, passed away on Sunday, October 1, 2023, after suffering a massive brain bleed on Tuesday, September 26. There is not much to tell – Tuesday at dinnertime she complained of pain in her right eye, then she quickly deteriorated (suddenly not knowing where I was in the room, ignoring everything on her left side) so I called 911 and rode with her in the ambulance to Memorial hospital, where a CAT scan proved the problem and a kind doctor explained she would not survive the only operation that would give her a chance.

Soon she could only look at me and squeeze my hand. By 3am, when they took us by ambulance to Samaritan Hospital in Troy, she had lost the ability to communicate. I thought she would pass away that night, but her strong heart beat for 5 more days in hospice care with no fluids or monitors, nothing but morphine and the swab sticks I used to moisten her mouth. Her whole family – my cousins and aunts and uncles – came to support her – and me.

The hospice workers and nurses at Samaritan were wonderful, cleaning my mother so gently, talking to her and making sure she was comfortable. I never felt like she was suffering, thank God.

At night I pulled a lounge chair next to her that thankfully folded out flat, and there I lay in the dark and the quiet and I loved my mother. I felt more love and compassion for her during that time than in maybe the whole of my life.

They told me she could hear me, so I made her a playlist of songs with her name in them (Daydream Believer and Little Jeannie) and artists she loved (Englebert Humperdink, Anne Murray, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra), and we listened to music together. I played her favorite movies (Gone with the Wind, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music).

I held her hand and watched her breathing. When sometimes she would pause for long seconds between breaths, I resisted the urge to shake her. Not yet! I’m not ready. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

It’s hard to explain. All I did was complain about her, I know, so I never imagined it would be this hard when she died. I thought I would feel relief, and a little unsettled. Instead I am pulled and pushed through a threshold of raw emotions. I turn in circles and get angry, then depressed, then confused, then resentful. I do feel relief, some, and an overwhelming sense of the unraveling of everything I grew accustomed to since I came here to live just over 9 months ago. All the daily preparations, cooking, cleaning, laundering, toileting, brushing her teeth and filing her nails and everything she needed, 7 days a week. The absence of it all is a strange vacuum.

I walk around this house and look at things and don’t know what to do with myself. I go through one drawer or closet at a time to keep myself busy, sifting through pieces of her life, then putting them back. It’s hard to decide to do anything at all with them. It feels like I’m erasing her to move her things.

For 9 months I was itching to be free, to get out of this house and join my friends on beach trips and getaway weekends, to go camping or travel somewhere or just have a break – any break. Now she is gone, and I don’t want to go anywhere and I don’t want to do anything. I don’t feel like getting up or making food or talking to anyone.

I don’t know how to not have a mother.

I don’t want to do whatever this is I am doing, but there is only this and there is only the doing of it. On Thursday I will drive down to visit Boo; I will hug him extra tight and tell him grandma loves you so much.

Rest now, momma. I love you more than I knew, and all the bad stuff is forgotten. Farewell.