Three Years and Avoidance

Next Friday it will be three years since I lost my Mom.

By some coincidence of the universe (or not) I’m actually going to be back at Dad’s next week, staying in the room where she took her last breath (and I think to myself suddenly–PLEASE let this NOT be the visit where they’ve decided to change the curtains in there!). My Gramma is in failing health and I feel like I need to get there to see her. We were supposed to go this week, but the girls and I all got a really mean virus and we had to postpone. Thus meaning that we’ll be there for “The Day.” For a large part of “The Week.”

I’m planning on doing my usual that day: Getting some roses and milkshakes and taking them to a cancer center for the folks getting infusions. It’s just that, this time, it will be Mom’s infusion center.

So all of that feels significant, but what really feels odd is the fact that I want to be so detached from it all this year. I don’t know if that is good or bad. I don’t know if it is healing or denial. I am leaning closer to denial, though I know that in some ways it’s healthy not to dwell on these things.

With the circumstances, I almost feel like it’s survival to not “go there” too much. To be IN the house with Dad and his new wife, to be back to see the scorchy grass of July in Illinois, to feel the heat, and to hear the Cicadas singing like I did that year, and that week.

I keep thinking about it and retreating. The last two years I obsessively went over again and again every little moment that I could remember. I catalogued and re-catalogued every instant. I refelt every feeling.

This year, I can’t. I don’t want to. It hurts too badly and I can’t afford to hurt that badly. It feels like avoidance and survival. But I don’t know if it’s healthy or harmful for me.

Regardless, I’ll do the best I can. I trust that God will lead me into the feelings I need to feel and support me in them. And I trust that the week will be what it is. About Mom, and about the life that is in front of me now.

It just feels really weird this year.

Visceral Connections

The night that my husband left for basic training, I went out to my parents house for supper.  I moped around, cried a little, but functioned.

Then I came home, and I got ready for bed.  I started to slip beneath the covers only to realize in physical reality that his body would not be next to mine.

And I called my Mommy.

I called, even though it was well past the proper time to call anybody.  And I cried.  I sobbed, and I screamed and I hollered.  “Mama, Mama….  I can’t do this.  I don’t want to do this.  I want him.  Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama….”

I think of that night so often now.  I still need my Mommy.  I still have so many nights when I just need to call her and scream, “Mama, Mama, Mama…”

Tonight, I deliberately watched the movie Two Weeks which chronicles the last two weeks in the life of the mother of four siblings.  I rightly guessed that I would laugh as much as I would cry.  I guessed that the film would approach the subject in a way that brought the quirky humanity of a family going through the dying process of one of it’s members together.

I suspected it would cause me to feel some things I haven’t allowed myself to feel in some time.  And I was ok with that.

At the end of the film I broke into sobs.  “MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA MOMMMMMMMEEEEEEEE” 

And as I did that I heard the echo of my 13 month old daughter who choruses “Mama, Mama, Mama,” as she goes throughout her day.  Anytime she needs something, or hurts, or is scared, or wants to share a discovery with someone I hear those beautiful words and I love them.

I felt this visceral connection down to my core tonight, as I shouted that word over and over and over again.  How tightly and intricately woven are the roles of one as a daughter, and one as a mother.

How is it that I pay attention to that so infrequently?

I long for my mother.  I long for her arms.  I long for an answer when I sob out her name, but all that comes in emptiness.  All that ever will come for the rest of my life will be emptiness, and longing, and the blackness of her absense in my life.

And so I turned tonight instead to Jesus.  And I begged him to hold me.  And He did.  And He is.

And tomorrow it won’t hurt any less.  It never really stops hurting.  But I’ve learned to find joy again, to be normal again, to be me–changed, wizened…  But me.  I’ll go back to that tomorrow.

For tonight, I just want my Mama.  And I am in that.  Christ is in that with me.  And that will have to be enough.

Lotion

One of the last tangible ways I was able to tell my Mom I loved her was by rubbing lotion into her feet. 

It seemed to comfort and soothe her, and the act of doing it, for whatever reason, comforted and soothed me.

The little things I could do at the end became obsessions:  Swabbing her mouth out, rubbing lotion into her legs and feet, adjusting the pillows and bedding, giving her pain medication, giving her a sponge bath with warm cloths.  When she was gone one of the first things I felt was the absence of those things, despite the fact that the last leg of her journey was really very short. 

I literally longed to rub lotion into her feet one more time.  It wasn’t that I wanted my Mom back in that state.  I know she was in pain.  I know it was time for her to go.  But as long as I could do those little things, I still had a little piece of her to hold onto.  As long as I could do those little things, I could serve her in some small measure of thanks for the 24 years that she served me. 

Sense-soaked Memories and Regrets

I remember so many of the sensations of those months:  The sticky summer evenings.  The dry, browning grass.  I remember the loneliness of it all–Husband was gone on the boat, and I was tackling the most difficult thing in my life. 

I remember evenings spent sitting with Mom in the living room–Me rocking my baby girl in the glider, and Mom sitting in her chair.  She began to speak more and more of her memories of growing up:  Taking her younger brother and sister to see Mary Poppins in the theater, the way she loved the smell of cooking popcorn at baseball games growing up.  Sometimes we would just sit quietly and she would gaze at Carolyn, soaking in the newness of her life. 

I wish there were more moments to remember.  I think I will always feel that I was foolish with my time.  I made the move to back to Illinois when Carolyn was 8 weeks old.  In the time I was back before Mom’s death, I took one trip to Washington to spend some time with my husband, and one trip to Kansas to celebrate my husband’s grandfather’s birthday.  I kick myself for those times away.  They were precious times, that I believed that we needed, but if I’d known our time was going to be so short I would never have gone.

I wince at the time I spent wasting time on the internet, or shopping, or just spacing out.  Why wasn’t I sitting with Mom?  Why wasn’t I just being with her?  Why wasn’t I asking her the myriad of questions that I long to know the answers to now?  I wasted time.  And I hate that. 

When I think of time lost, I get angry at myself, but I also get angry at the situation.  I was blindsided by my Mom’s decline.  I believed we’d have so much more time to get used to losing her.  I believed that we’d have a more victorious battle.  I believed Mom would find a stretch of good days and we’d live it up again.  She’d go to the riverboat, and we’d go to things as Mother and Daughter and Granddaughter.  There would be time to talk over the ‘big things.’  I mistakenly thought there would be so many more normal moments, before we came to the slipping away moments.  And even those last few precious days looked nothing like I expected.

Gone

I woke up from a short, but fitful sleep to nurse my 4 month old daughter.  I’d just latched her off when I heard a knock on my bedroom door.

It was my Dad.  “She’s gone, Val.”

I slipped back to their room to see that he was right.  The empty, tortured look in her eyes was gone, and in it’s place was a look of peace.  Some fluid had gurgled up in her last moments and I wiped it away from her mouth.  I turned to look at Dad and asked if he wanted me to call the Hospice Nurse on Call.  He nodded, unable to speak.

I remember wondering when I had been imbued the steely strength necessary to make a phone call and say the words, “My Mom is dead,” as I dialed the number and said the words with steadiness.

We sat numbly my husband, my father, my baby daughter, and I as we waited for the hospice nurse to arrive.  When she arrived, she immediately hugged me.  I felt comforted and awkward all at once.  This was a woman I’d never met.  During our short week on hospice, we’d hardly met our own team members let alone the other nurses on call. 

The nurse followed me back to Mom’s room.  She took in the scene quickly, and gathered up some pillows and bedding that had been soiled.  She walked them and me to the washing machine and had me start a load commenting that it would save my Daddy some hurt later.  A small part of me wondered why I didn’t need to be spared that hurt.

We flushed Mom’s meds down the toilet.  Tablet after tablet of Morphine, Ativan, Zofran… 

The Coroner came along with our pastor and the funeral director.  I remember seeing Mom’s body, draped in white, wheeled down the ramp that my uncle had built for her just a couple of weeks before.  It was the only time she used it.

I cried some.  Mostly I just sat shocked and numb.  So much happened.  And suddenly it was 9 in the morning and every one was gone and we were left to sit with the truth of what had happened that morning. 

Everything was so matter of fact.  Everything just happened around us.  After a brief nap my husband (who had been flown in on emergency leave from an aircraft carrier just hours before Mom died), my daughter, and I went into town.  We spent some time at a park nearby, sitting in the sunshine and talking quietly.  I wanted to do something that affirmed life after being in that house waiting for death.

So extraordinary, and so commonplace.  This was the event that turned my life upside down, and yet at that point I was cocooned in numbness.

She was gone.

Dear Mama,

This is an ongoing letter to you.  These are words that I wish you could read.  These are words that want to spill out of me on the phone or sitting across a table from you, but can’t anymore.

It’s been nearly 2 years since you died.  I wanted to type ‘you left us,’ but this is a blog, and as such vaguely veiled comments shall be suspended, at least for the moment.

I miss you every day.  I’m too young to be without a Mom.  No, at 26 I’m not a child anymore…  but I still can’t help but feel that you should still be here.  You were supposed to still be here.

And so here I am, writing this letter into the great vortex of cyberspace.  I write the words not out of some mystical hope that ‘you’ll read them somehow somewhere.’  This is not even just a ‘therapeutic device’ to make me feel ‘better’ on those days when I ache for you so much.  It’s not about them somehow getting to you, or feeling like you know what’s going on in my life.  Whether you can here the vast number of, “Oh Mamas” that I whisper into darkness, or read these words is a moot point.  I just know that somehow I need to write this.  I write these letters so that these words can somehow stop rattling around in me.  I write them because…  I know there is a fellowship of those who have lost in a deep and life-altering way, and part of me hopes that these words might strike a chord to a few of those in the fellowship.

I know that you still ARE…  you ARE in that place of great beauty.  I saw it on your face in the moments after you were gone.  I know that you ARE and that you are in that place, whatever it may be, because that is what hope is.

So these are my letters, Mama.  My letters for you.

I love you.

Me