Grief Has A Thousand Names

none of which I can speak yet 

In February it was 30 years since I lost my mother. That time was especially difficult for me and still to this day I struggle telling the story of her death and how her life affected me. For so long I thought it was just her death that hit me hard, but no, it wasn’t just her death and the part I played. 

So much more was happening at the time. 

Sitting in the darkened room holding my mothers hand while she slept. There was nothing I could do to make her more comfortable. I was there and that’s all I could offer. Her pain was more than the morphine could handle anymore. She’d been here in this bed for 6 months and I was tired. 

I am grateful that I was ignorant of the way death comes. Somehow I thought when she couldn’t handle it anymore, she’d die. I had no idea it was just the beginning. She’d been eating organic for years and her organs were healthy, it was just her bones that were disintegrating and causing her beg to die in agony.

I sat holding her hand, her best friend Barbara sitting across from me holding her other hand. We watched her breath. In and out, then we’d wait. Was that the last one? No, there it is, another breath. Each one reduced to her last breath. We sat there through the night, napping when we didn’t want to, so afraid I’d miss her last breath. I couldn’t, wouldn’t leave her and I was so grateful that Barbara was there with me. 

In the morning, Carl, my mother’s first born, came to the house. He’d called his friend who’s father owned a glass company in town. A stretcher wouldn’t fit through the hallway so we had to remove the window to get her out. We’d decided it was time to give up and take her to the hospital.  She’d spent years fighting the AMA and choosing alternative care instead.  We realized we couldn’t control her pain anymore.  We called the ambulance once the window was removed, they brought in the stretcher and I rode with her to the hospital, leaving her home for the last time. 

She didn’t die then just because she couldn’t go on living that way, she lived in the hospital for another 15 months. It is still too much for me to face, it’s been 30 years in February, but it was so much more than just my mother dying, my whole life was changing and I was in a rushing tide with no control or choosing of my own. I held on tight and tried to save myself. There are no words. Still.