10:14 a.m. - 2022-11-08
I thought I would wake up today and be dead, but instead I wake up and see my husband.- Judy Baldwin
My mom died in August.
It's been a strange time, all of this.
In some ways, I feel like I started mourning her death in March of 2020. When the pandemic really started to take hold, when nothing was known, when groceries were left outside and dutifully wiped down with the precious and few antibacterial wipes found squirreled away in the back of a closet, when mask patterns were still being tested to see what fit our faces best, when porches were sat on and neighbors were waved to at a distance, when walks were taken with masks hastily pulled up whenever someone was encountered, when all others were eyed warily wondering who had it or who didn't, when no air was to be trusted, when our hands and nails dried out from dousing them in antibacterial gels, when it dawned on me in the shower one day that I may never see my mom again with her lungs being as compromised as they were and I cried for 35 minutes my tears and and shower water mixing together.
I did get to see her again. A few times. The last time in the house, was in July when I was up for another family members funeral and her hands were quiet. She preferred to sit in a wingback chair in the corner of the living room, surrounded by natural light from the two windows making up the corner and a standing lamp that glowed from above her head as her fingers were in constant motion - knitting, stitching, sewing, planning what next to knit, stitch or sew.
When her hands were quiet and all she could do was sit I knew this was it.
When she told me that I could help myself to any of her wool stash, I knew this was it. She was famous for offering up her enormous stash to me and saying "take a little....no, not that" when something was chosen.
When I said goodbye to her the next day and she was coughing and on the toilet, and her face, and hair cut, and hair color, everything was kind of cast in a golden light and I was not looking at my mothers face, I was looking at my grandmothers face, I knew.
She went into the hospital two and a half weeks later and the hospital said "oh! she has pneumonia!" and it was WELL OF COURSE she has pneumonia! She cracked her ribs in May when she was pulled off her feet by my brothers dog (that's another story for another day in this just sewer tank of a year).
She was given antibiotics and steroids and according to my dad, she was like a new person. She was sitting up and very talkative and felt like she could probably drive now. And then sometime in the next day there was a change and the lungs condensed (the doctors were careful to not say collapse but it was something else where it was like the lungs constricted and compacted into themselves) and then suddenly we were talking about hospice.
Talking to my dad at work, he began to breakdown on the phone and his voice hit a register that I've never heard before and it took me a second to understand he was crying and I softly said "I will come up tomorrow"
And my world began to spiral and I burst into tears at work and my husband who is the best thing to ever happen to me booked a hotel and we put our aging dog who has started to pee his bed at night in the car and we went to Pennsylvania the next day.
When I saw my mom, I gave her a hug and I said "please don't be scared" and she said "you're not helping" but she was so ready to go. My youngest brother got there a little after I did and we all sat helplessly staring at our mother slip in and out of twilight and my dad kept trying to understand the hospice process and both my mom and dad were using hospice like assisted suicide, requesting the respiratory therapist to turn her oxygen down, and increase the morphine and let it do its thing.
7pm came and we went back to my parents house and we had pizza that was much more expensive than it should have been, but it was also really good.
Chach and I went back to the hotel later and tried to swim in the pool but there were 7 tiny kids- all under 2 years old- in various flotation devices and the water was weirdly salty so we took Silkwood showers when we got back to the room.
The next day, we all arrived at the hospital and my mom was alert and chatty and asking for ice cream and annoyed with the fact she was still alive. When the hospice advocate came in, she made her displeasure known to her, angrily saying "I thought i'd wake up today and I would be dead, but instead I wake up and I see my husband".
The widowed wife of my fathers best friend came in, bursting with energy having seen my post on facebook saying that my mother was "actively dying" which upset my brother but I told him "i'm sorry if you don't like that term, but that's what this phase of life is called".
My mom was talking to Yvonne and making fun of some woman they knew and I thought "there is no way this woman is dying any time soon" and Todd senses the same thing and moves his flight out to Tuesday and my mother chastises him saying "why? So you can watch me die?"
Hushed conversations are had with the hospice advocate and my father keeps pronouncing the doctor's name "Roku". I don't actually know who the doctor was.
Then my brothers go away for lunch and a respiratory therapist comes in and turns the oxygen down and I text my brothers that I don't think it's long now and they come back and for the next two and a half hours, my dad is standing next to my mothers hospital bed holding and squeezing her hand and her breathing changes and softens and gets very shallow and she stops squeezing my dads hand back.
In many ways, it was far easier to watch my mother go than I thought it would be. She was in so much pain, and wasn't breathing well and she was increasing frustrated by the litany of doctors appointments and procedures which to her, just seemed to make her situation worse.
The day she died, when she was still very lucid, I asked if she would come back and visit me like Grandma comes back to visit me and she said 'definitely'.
I don't know that I've seen her since, except about two weeks after she died, an oriole bird was in my backyard and it was hoping around in a tree not far from my face so I got a very good look at it. My mom's high school colors were black and orange and on her charm bracelet, there is an orange and black pennant with a big P on it, which i think I remember her saying it was for Princeton, but it also worked for Pennsbury.

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