I’ve lived 64 years now and have been married once, had one child, and the rest has gone by so fast it is a blur…
That’s a direct quote. Directly from a journal entry that my mother had written as she laid in a hospital bed dying from cancer. There’s more to it than just that quote, but I’ll keep the rest to myself. That one sentence above speaks for itself though.
My mother passed away last Sunday night at around 5:27 PM after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. She passed with her cousin and dear friend Lois by her side. Her last day or so was painful for her, so it was a good thing as she is no longer in pain.
I got to spend quite a bit of time with my mother in her last days. I stayed with her pretty much the entire last few days she was conscious and then her final night on this earth. When I left to go home and take a much-needed shower, she decided it was time to go. My aunts went on to tell me that this is the same thing that happens with all of the mothers in our family that have passed from cancer in the past, and unfortunately, there’s been several, like the one my mother had. Mothers wait until their children leave the room to take their final breath.
I got to talk to Mom a lot the last couple of days of her life. She was in between significant doses of morphine and fentanyl, but she was still coherent right up to her last night on this earth. She was anything but soft. The nurses told me that it took a lot of morphine to make her comfortable, more than usual. I can’t help but think that the years of alcoholism and smoking that wrecked her body to the effect of it essentially shutting down at the age of 64, must have played a role in her tolerance to pain meds as well.
We talked about memories of when I was a child. The times back on Bear Paw Trail when she was overprotective of a flower bed in her yard and how she would go off on anyone that stepped in retrieving basketballs from the court at the next door neighbor’s house, even her own son. The time we lived out in Del Valle and my dog at the time, a Golden Retriever named KC that thought I was her own child so much that she would leave her litter of puppies to walk me to the bus stop, turned on me one morning doing just that. She started growling like she was going to bite me. I then ran back to my house and cried to Mom that KC was acting weird and I thought she had rabies. It turns out KC was guarding me against a big ringtailed cat hiding in the weeds. KC was being a protective Mom. My mother smiled when I told her that story.
If I’m being sincere, I had some guilt to deal with when I first went to go see my mother, which I wrote about a few weeks ago here. I felt regret that I didn’t come by sooner and waited so late in her journey with this disease to reach out. I had to let her know that in my own way.
I tried several times to apologize to her for not fighting harder to mend our relationship over the past few years. She wouldn’t have it. She would tell me in any way she could, even heavily medicated, “there’s nothing to apologize for. We’re good”.
I tried to communicate how sorry I was I couldn’t ever find a way to love her back as I got older and she slipped further and further into drinking. I told her how horrible it felt for me to know that I couldn’t possibly care enough in these last days of her life to perhaps make up for all the time we wasted being mad at each other for things that didn’t really matter now.
I think that was probably the hardest thing for either of us. Fully aware that nothing was going to bring that time back.
That was pretty much the most difficult of our conversations before she died though. The rest were some of the most precious moments that we’ve had over my 41 years on this earth.
She spoke to me about how proud she was of Adrian and me. How she loved to brag about me graduating from college and going on to graduate school. Mom wasn’t much on education, she dropped out of high school as a sophomore to go out and live life, but she never wanted that for me. She told me how she loved to show pictures of her grandson and her beautiful daughter-in-law. She thought Stephanie was one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen and that she looked like an angel. She told me how much she enjoyed reading my website and how she was amazed at how much I enjoyed writing. That wasn’t exactly my thing back in the day.
I think probably the most cherished thing I’ll remember of us talking though wasn’t anything she said explicitly, but more in the way she spoke and carried herself.
You see my mother was a lot of great things, funny, independent, hard-headed, remarkably candid, and highly extroverted, but it was always her greatest weakness that she struggled with. The manner that I still feel drove her to some dark places in her life.
My mother had a hard beginning in her life. Her parents divorced under difficult circumstances at a young age and she never fully recovered from it. I don’t think it was just pain in general that she never recovered from though, I think it was the anger at the circumstances of life that she couldn’t control that she struggled with. She wasn’t mad at her parents for getting a divorce, she was angry at the world for what she was suffering through and the fact that she had no control over the situation.
That anger consumed her for many years. So much so that she struggled with relationships with most people, even her mother who lived just a few doors down and her only son that lived just a mile down the road.
But in the end, in those last few weeks of her life, as we reconnected, I could tell immediately that all of that was gone. I could tell instantly when I walked in her room at her care center that she was not consumed with what she couldn’t control anymore, but was more interested in the now. Specifically with her grandson in the room. Her words were no longer about the wrongs that she was angry about, but the good things that have happened lately. Fun stories, good memories, and a future that looked bright, even if she didn’t know how much she was to be a part of it.
To put in as plainly as I possibly can, I think Mom finally came to peace with the fact that life just isn’t fair. In fact, at the darkest of moments, it can be quite hell. I believe feeling her body fail from terminal cancer taught her that, but I think she also realized that this is ok. I mean not ok to be sick or to be in pain, but it is in these moments, the good and the bad, that we live and cherish life. All of us, and that it’s the moments that bring us together. These moments make us feel the most alive.
The experience of life is not supposed to be fair or easy, and the fact that it may seem hard at times is nobody’s fault, but it’s in dealing with the suffering of life that brings people together. It’s what makes us, well us. It’s what makes us families. It’s what brings a son and a mother back together that have not spoken in many years.
In the end, Mom just quit worrying about the things that she couldn’t control and lived her life out just like she always did, on her terms, but she did it at peace. A peace that I feel now will last her an eternity.
Rest in Peace Mom, see you when I get there
Johnny