My mom died on May 14, 2020 at 4:14 pm. I was alone by her bedside, begging her to not let me be the one she stopped on. She was as obstinate as an ox she never listened to me. We were antagonists. Best friends, yes, but bitterly brazen with each other. She was what I wasn’t, or more aptly, refused to be, and I was what she couldn’t be. And, yet, we were each other’s go-to person. It was infuriating almost incessantly and it never wavered. It still hasn’t. She’s gone and I am still here cleaning up her unfinished intentions. I have placed them above my own, another infuriating admission.
It is almost Christmas. For her this was the pinnacle of her favorites. She had a lot of them. She would call it her “best” list. There was no middle ground with her. It either was the “best,, ever” or it just was. I was rummaging through one of her boxes of left-over belongings, of which she also had many. Too many to go through in her last days in any kind of semblance of organizing. The painstaking last days with her were full of anger, falling deeper into herself and palpable denial of the cheating she was conceding herself to. While she was growing more despondent, less aware, she was also growing increasingly irritable. I knew it to be the acceptance that her grip on this life was being pulled from all of our clenched fists. December 2019 was the last pieces of her life that I can say had any value to them. It was the last time of any kind of normalcy was assigned to a calendar and a season. My birthday was on December 14. She had her mastectomy on the 16th. One celebration marred by the fear of another looming day. She returned from the hospital two days later resilient to have it behind her, and, recovering like a vigilante. She was up and resuming her life of decorating her old log home for all of us to be present on the 25th. There were garlands of tiny jingle bells encircling her candle lit chandelier over the farmhouse dining table. Head-knockers the rest of us called them., had they ever been lit for real we would have all had heads full of flames. She was barely 5 ft tall. She was the only person who enjoyed them unencumbered. Like everything else her home was hers. She wanted you to think it was beautifully festive, but, livable for life-sized humans was not a priority. The farmhouse dining room table dated from the early 1800’s when growth hormones in mild remained yet undiscovered and people weighed 70 pounds and never hit the 5-foot finger for the carnival ride admissions. She was small, tiny, frail for the last 6 months, but never not fierce. The lot of us sat sideways to eat. She pulled her chair up and was perfectly content as the only one with elbows to table.
I know she left this life feeling as if she had been cheated. That’s the single thing I carry the heaviest in my heart. She may not have ever written out, or declared a plan, but with all of her life weighted on the “best’ side there was no continuum of a life spectrum that allowed peaceful passage.
As December ended and the cold of Winter settled in she was becoming more painful, less able, and running the maze of ineptitude that stole her the ability to define how she wanted to spend her last days. There was promise, shallow, empty, and inconsequential all around her. Falsities that there would be more for her. More years, more holidays, more time and yes, even hope. Thinking back on it maybe that was for her benefit? Once she was finally diagnosed, and her prognosis laid out she rolled over and gave up. She said that it was just so she could go home. Be the one place she was most content. There in her dark log cabin steeped with historical markers of significance she was most at peace. March brought bed. Bed led into wheelchairs, oxygen tanks and bedside commodes. Life steals your freedom as much as it does give you purpose. Once she was relegated to that room every tiny piece of tinsel in its purview served as redirected aggression. The tv had, (absolutely HAD) to be on 24/7. Specifically, on CNN. It was an endless loop of pandemic fear. A 1950’s black and white psychological thriller that left ever viewer mad with bleakness. I have not watched the news since. I am not sure I will ever be able to again. She was desperate to hear bad news coming from others peoples lives as a way to blanch and beige her own. Other people were dying suffering, therefore, she was not alone. I drowned my madness in buckets of soapy water and vacuum cleaner bags. I did for her the manual labors of keeping a house her pain-filled movements stole. I stayed distracted while she stayed glued to the tube. She refused to sleep. She was angry, but, she wasn’t going to miss a minute. she became anorexic. Her last vestige of control. Constipation visited once and she wouldn’t be its pawn again, never mind the difficulty and embarrassment of assistance in getting to, and use the facilities small plastic child’s potty or green mile walk to the bathroom when it was still afforded to her.
She would not let go of that damned t.v. remote. It would not be allowed to watch anything but CNN. For all of the endless days I spent with her, and the begging I pleaded for any kind of terrible 80’s sitcom to just be free from the suffocating death it was met with anger. She would lie back, turn me off, and wait out her one hour, more often 30 minutes of Golden Girls in stubborn self-pity silence. I conceded after three days of trying. She played her death hand with biting fury. Absent from verbal request. She knew I felt sorry for her and that was enough to allow her any kind of three-room single level torture for as long as it was going to take.
February was all about cleaning out. Her Christmas decorations had outlived their welcome. I was answering her endless requests for cold packs, pillows, bed up, bed down, water, ginger ale, food she had no intention of eating, turn the lights off, close the shades, keep it dark, close out the world short of a 42 inch screen, find her phone, figure out the next dose of pain meds, and, “no” she had no idea of what she had taken last”, and, “no,” she had not written anything down, like ever,, or if she did she couldn’t remember if she actually took it, or just checked it off. Among all of this was her constant complaining about “why the Christmas decorations’ were still up. Everything was annoying. We were both onboard with that.
All of the joy of her life had up to this stumble been collecting things to look at and enjoy. Suddenly those same things were whispering to her. Hissing, spitting, and speaking in a tongue that nipped at her.
“There’s too much stuff!” She wanted it away. Mind you she had a horizon of 20 feet, at most. But for February that bleak winter scape had to be clear cut. I tried to remind her how much joy these Yuletide tidings had brought her. Putting them out in their places just a few weeks ago. I attempted to find that place inside where I had always known her to reside. The place of things that brought memories of the life we had walked together. Every single, and I do mean this literally, every single piece of décor was something we had gotten together. Packaging it up was putting away pieces of her that I wanted to keep reflecting upon, and alive. As the exhaustion of the reality of her fading set in life changed. Hospital beds came. Oxygen machines with their tentacles spread all over the room. Pistons firing and they spit her moist breath back into her failing lungs. The antiques were shoved away. And one night the rest of the room went too.
Within the days of grieving, her relentless pursed lips refusing to face the choir calling her, and the anger a family stuck in this place brings, I didn’t notice it. Days were bleeding into each other. No nights, no days, just doctors, piecemeal facilities, and poor investments in a dying woman no one wanted to take personal possession of in the form of informed guidance left us all lost, and then there was this pandemic problem. No one came or went without absolute scrutiny and the possibility of hitchhiking a virus on. She had options that all included, “if she goes you won’t be able to visit.” Which when you are dying surmounts to “say your goodbyes now.”
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| My mom always made the packages more delightful than the contents. These are presents she gave me years ago. I will never open them. They remain as so much of the things around me are, holding on to her. |
I have kept her alive by keeping her stuff with me, the things I remember her with. In short doses of re-finding and investigation i open the boxes hastily removed from her home. I put up a Christmas tree yesterday. It is the first in about 7-8 years. She had one every year. We would help her procure it, place it, and she hoarded the decorating of it all to herself. For the trees I never had time to buy, place, decorate or enjoy she had hers and hers was only a few miles away. We didn’t need both.
This brutal year, in this miserable season of social nothings, I cut a tree down in my own yard, and I decorated it with her ornaments. I am finishing things for her as I see it. It isn’t just about trying to keep her traditions alive, at least not this year. It feels like I am exhuming the things that remind me of her.
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| My last Christmas present from my mom. |
In one tucked away corner of the upstairs hallway I found her favorite ornaments. They had been piled in a basket. Discarded in a rush and without any idea of the value they possessed. Her antique bird ornaments. The kind with the tinsel tails. The kind you cannot find anymore. It almost crippled me to see how haphazardly they were piled. It infuriated me. She is in there and someone just piled them away. I know it was done with her yelling in the background to just “get them out.”
I am coming to terms with the waves of emotions this brings. It is grief. All sides, shades and flavors. There is anger among them. I don’t know how to process the rest without acknowledging it in the gaps.
Maybe the stuff she spent her life finding, the stuff that made the anger of her “best days” was the stuff that was bitterly reminding her of what she was losing? Her bitter edged visual reminder was easier to excise on her terms, then to surrender as stolen? Maybe she overlooked how important these things would be to those of us who had nothing else left as a tangible reminder? I am angry about all of this. How much she hated losing her life and how that hate colored, poisoned everything else around her. How that fear of everything (driving, standing up for herself in any way that didn’t make her look like a jaded victim, and staying with a miserable person who made her miserable) was also the same fear that wouldn’t let her feel grateful her children outlived her. Or that her life was always full of things she had found beauty in. This year has been smothered in death and loss and yet her little tree lives on in my home with all of its sparkling divineness.
For more on my mom and our journey please see;
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