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.
