This is a weird time for me. Every February, the bitch of the month I really despise, I ground a lot of this to the fact that tomorrow is the 9th anniversary of my mother’s death.
I go through this every damned February. Now, you must understand as I write this annoying autobiographical pause, that my mother was my best friend. She, Homer and I were extremely close. We did a lot together and she was a good mom if I say so myself.
I may be 41, but you never get over losing a parent. The cancer she had was really horrible and we saw this lovely, vibrant woman disintegrate before our eyes over a period of 14 months.
We said goodbye a hundred times a day in little ways. I said goodbye the last time I saw her play the piano (she was playing Mozart) because I knew it would be the last time. I said goodbye when I noticed she wasn’t comprehending what was going on a television program she liked and that her mind was playing tricks on her and she was seeing something very different than what I was seeing. The cancer metastasized into her brain in messy tumors that cut into her cognitive ability so it destroyed the mind and the body.
I can’t tell you how many times I would watch her and know that something she was doing was for the last time. And each time, I said goodbye in my heart.
You have no idea how many times I said goodbye. It was a gift, I know that because so many people don’t get to say that word to their loved ones. But it didn’t make it any less hard knowing she was dying. Waking up in the morning, knowing my mother was dissolving in front of my eyes, and that this beautiful woman was evaporating because her body, as all bodies do, was betraying her and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it but love her.
Yesterday, Scout, who is one of those people that is very kind, asked me if I wanted to talk about it. She’s been around me enough to know that February, the bitch of a month that it is, is clearly a time where I go through reflection, fear and the rest of it.
I declined when she initially asked, because it still hurts. It’s still weird to talk about the that time in my life taking care of someone who was terminally ill. It’s hard to explain in words the depth of that hurt. It’s hard to explain that there wasn’t a choice because it was my mother and that I wanted to save her.
But later in the day, I did start talking to Scout about it over a beer and it was like I couldn’t shut up. It was one of the first times I actually talked to someone else about my mother’s last moments. There were no angels singing, there was no sense of purpose to it all and I’m not going to romanticize it. It was death. Very straight forward, her small ravaged body tired of radiation and chemotherapy, her body tired and her spirit, although not broken, bruised. The nurse told us to tell her to go and we did. And it wasn’t pretty or beautiful or any of those things you see in the movies.
Her body stopped. Because she died from respiratory failure, it was messy.
And she just died.
And then immediately, before we knew what was going on, the nurses came in and life at the hospital began in a surreal slow motion that to this day is hard for me to talk about. My mother turned green. I wish I was joking, but I’m not. There was so much radiation in her body that she just turned this green color. The last thing I said to my mother’s dead body was “Mom, you’re green.” I smiled because she would have appreciated my half-hearted attempt at a joke and walked out of the hospital room and walked into the hall looking for my father who I was going to ride home with.
I didn’t cry right then, I waited. I think that is why I cry about it every February because I didn’t really cry then. I went into action mode. There were things to be done. People to call, arrangements to make, a father to heal. People came, they hugged us and I smiled all through it because funerals, I have discovered, are for other people more so than they are for the family. There was no time to comprehend that my mother, a woman I adored, wasn’t coming back.
And that I was on my own. No more words of advice, no more kicking my ass for being an idiot.
There was a nothingness. A hole I still have trouble filling.
Grief is an odd, choking thing, isn’t it? I’m crying now because it’s been nearly a decade, a fourth of my life, that I haven’t had my mother and I miss her.
She was only 54 years old. And so I’m sort of stuck this week because I still grieve as does Homer.
So in honor of her for the next couple of days, be kind to each other. Say something nice to someone. Just be well.
We’ll be back to our regular programming here at the ‘coma in a little while.
