Three Months

Stepping off the elevator, I turned left towards the Recuperative Care Unit of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz.    

Standing in front of a big picture window stood a young woman about my age.  Jeans, tee shirt and a zippered sweatshirt, long brown hair falling in her face, I could see she was crying.  Since that’s about all I did anymore, I thought I’d stop and see what was up.

I felt pulled to this young woman as I often do to strangers.  I walked up and just stood next to her.  “Why are you here?” I asked. I’ve always been willing to speak to a stranger and my style is to talk to them like I know them personally.  I figure we’re pretty much all the same when it comes to this sort of situation.  

  Her answer was unsettling to me.  She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, looked at me and said, “My mother has been here for 3 months and today I am taking her home to die.  To my home.”  

“Is she in pain?”  I asked.

“No, but she’s dying.  

After a moment for this to sink in I said softly, maybe to her, “Oh, no.  Three months?  How did you do it? I couldn’t do three months! No, I can’t do three more months.”  

She looked at me with tearful eyes and told me that she’d been here every day with her mother who was fighting lung cancer and had been getting treatments but now wanted to go home to die.

She looked at me with pity in her eyes.  She, too, had thought, “No, I couldn’t do that.”  

But life has a way of showing you just what you are capable of  and it’s always more than you thought you were able to handle.  

I heard her pain and immediately empathized.  Three months seemed like more than I could ever consider.  Three months of coming to the hospital?  I sympathized with her and told her she’d already done more than I could imagine.  We stood together and thought of our Mother’s, ourselves.  We didn’t talk for long but I’ll assume she probably had a husband and kids like I did.  We were both too young and so over our heads with grief.  

It was early December 1984, I was 28 years old.  Life had gotten very complex for me in the past year.  I was barely hanging on to my own sanity, my full time job and my newly formed blended family.

My Mother had been bedridden for the last six months at home trying to fight her bone cancer through an alternative therapy.  She’d been eating organic for eight years already and following the strict dietary requirements of the Gerson Therapy.  

For those six months that my Mom was stuck in a bed at home, I’d drive the 20 minutes it took to get to my parents house, during my one hour lunch break. I’d run in the back door, make the healing drink of liver from a calf no older than 3 days mixed with chopped carrots and apples and centrifugally spun into a juice.  While she drank her juice I’d give her a coffee enema to relieve her pain and I’d sit with her. I was her sunshine but I could only stay less than a half hour.  I raced to get back to work on time fighting through my tears.

While she was trying to self heal she drank so much carrot juice that her skin turned orange.  She consumed two 25 pound bags of organic carrots every week.  

This was in the mid 80’s and it was lucky for us that we lived near Santa Cruz because the  organic movement was just becoming important and it was available up in the mountains. She’d been fighting her cancer for about 6 years already.  She’d done the surgery, the chemo and the radiation.  Then she decided to follow the Gerson Therapy, illegal in the states, an alternative nutritional therapy and had gone twice to the clinic.  I went with her once and learned much about life and death at that renovated Mexican motel in Rosarita Beach. She’d forged a gallant fight for so many years. 

This young woman and her mother left that day.  All I could think about all day long was ‘3 months?’  I can’t do 3 months.  Oh, no, I can’t do 3 more months of this.  I’m already tired, already done.  We kept looking at my mom  being admitted to the hospital as some kind of relief. I don’t know what I expected.  I didn’t have the luxury of time to consider what might be coming at me because what was in my lap was so much more than I could cope with already.

I was at the hospital to visit my mother who had cancer that had metastasized from her breast to her bones.  She was bright, vibrant and had been in charge at work and at home and was only 56 years old. 

I remember her crying to me after her doctor had first put her on bed rest after breaking her leg at my house on Mothers’ Day seven months earlier. She was worried she’d go crazy in bed for two weeks but she refused to go to the hospital.  Little did she know that those two weeks would turn into 6 months.  The morphine she took for the excruciating pain was provided by a holistic doctor and administered by a holistic nurse who was also a neighbor living  up in the Santa Cruz mountains but at some point it wasn’t enough.

On December 1st we just couldn’t manage her pain anymore and decided it was time to admit her.  That night our family friend Barbara and I had spent the night sitting in small wooden chairs on either side of her bed watching and waiting for each individual breath willing her to live.  

The next morning we called the local glass company to come out and remove the picture window of the room my mom had hibernated in for the last six months trying to heal herself.  She could no longer move and would have to be carried out on a stretcher and the stretcher wouldn’t make the necessary turns to go down the hallway.  A lack of foresight on my Mom’s part I’d say, and she’d agree with me.   Neither she nor anyone else ever thought it would be 6 months that she’d spend in that room and even though at some point we knew it was not working we never thought that she’d have to be carried out.  

Once the window was removed we called the ambulance and they came to take her to the hospital, I rode with her  leaving her home for the last time.   My father and older brother followed, my husand and son following them.  

My father sat by her side morning till nightfall day in and day out. He’d sit and read the paper and they’d watch tv together.   She was on a permanent morphine drip and was alert and sociable. She had many visitors and often it seemed she held court.  I came 6 days a week.  

It was different having her in the hospital but not really a relief.  My days were now longer and I was just as tired but I was no longer responsible for her daily juice, the race to visit and assist during my lunch hour.  

Mornings were still full of activity, laundry, bed making , breakfast, kids, shower, hair, makeup, finding a clean and ironed outfit.  Before leaving the house, a quick run through picking up stray items, I pour myself a cup of coffee and as I drove past the hospital on my way to work, I give my mom a quick nod, ‘see you later, Mom’.

I was her sunshine and she needed to live vicariously through me so I had to make sure to have a story or two for her entertainment each evening after work.

For the next 15 months I worked full time, and 5 nights a week I would stop by the hospital and visit with my mom and dad. Saturdays were spent in her big double sunny room with the entire family watching sports and visiting, kids playing on the floor.

In one way life was better for me now. I could work without her calling me screaming to help her die.  I could go to lunch with friends without guilt.

In another way my day was so much longer now.  After work I’d jump in the car and fight the traffic to Santa Cruz.  Sitting in the parking lot at the hospital, I’d take a moment for myself.  A moment when I wasn’t responsible to nor for someone else.  When I’d muster up the strength to face my parents another day not knowing what I’d find as I walked into her room after work in the early evening, bringing her my world of sunshine.  

Some days I’d have Jasmine, our nanny, bring the kids to me at the hospital after she fed them but other nights I’d stay for only an hour or so and rush home to be mom and to do homework and baths and bed.  

This was a time in my life that I often thought I couldn’t go on but somehow I did.  My mom spending six months at home in bed and 15 months in the hospital  caus me to carry the burdens of the stress those hours, days, weeks, months and years heaped upon me.

When you think you can’t go on another step all you can do is take it one day at a time and if that get’s too difficult take it hour by hour or even breath by breath, but when given no other choice know that you can do just about anything.  

I wish I still knew this young woman I’d talked to that day on the way into seeing my mom.   How had I thought this was going to end?  How long did I think that my Mom had to live?  I knew I couldn’t do 3 more months. I remember thinking it might be days, maybe weeks but never months!  We brought her here to die in comfort.

My Mother died at Dominican Hospital on February 23, 1986. 15 months later. 

I couldn’t have imagined how I’d ever get through 15 months that day I stood next to that young woman at the window.  But now I know how I did it and I can teach you just as easily.  Day by day...you just get up and do it again.  Don’t think about it, just do it. The payoff is that I know in my soul that I did everything I could have done for her.  I have no guilt, no regret.  

I once met this woman who told me she’d just done 3  months…I said, “no, I could never do 3 months.’