Separation
Your
absence has gone through me
Like thread
through a needle.
Everything
I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin
In February 2013 my mother was diagnosed with stage IV lung
cancer. She died two weeks
later. It was a fast and
bewildering journey to the end of the road with her. I barely remember much from those final two weeks, mostly
just a kaleidoscope of moments:
sitting next to my mother as we got her diagnosis and trying not to
faint while I watched her take the news so stoically (it’s my belief, however, that
this was not news to her, that she had been diagnosed long before and kept it a
secret from everyone…but that’s another story); the first trip to the emergency
room and the painfully frank conversation with the ER doctor about where this
was all headed; having a complete meltdown in line at the pharmacy while picking up some prescriptions; trying to have
conversations with my mother while she was higher than a kite on Dilaudid and quickly
losing the ability to articulate herself. And then there
are the memories and images that will never go away, that haunted me for many months
after her death. I won’t share
those.
I think it goes without saying that caring for the dying and
going through the experience of being with someone as they are leaving this
world is both profound and profoundly horrible at the same time. I stumbled numbly through those two weeks
watching her condition deteriorate on a daily basis. Her prognosis was re-evaluated often. What started out as months quickly
became weeks, which even more quickly became days and then hours. It was like being caught in a landslide, watching everything slip away and not being able to do anything about it.
You learn a lot going through something like that. When you
experience a loss of that magnitude, as my friend Alyson so appropriately put
it, it's like being inducted into a club that no one wants to be a member of, one whose
members have all experienced the same kind of tragic loss. I’ll take it a step further and say that along with that unwanted membership comes the knowledge of a new language: the language of grief. It’s very difficult to articulate what
this means, and even more difficult to share with others. For those who have gone down this road,
it’s like a secret handshake, a gesture, a code that only we know. It doesn’t always need to be articulated verbally. Sometimes you don’t even have to
finish or even start a sentence with a kindred. You both just know,
and simply being with that person and not speaking about your shared sense of loss can often be
enough. We speak to the uninitiated in metaphors and colorful phrases meant to evoke the pain, the horror, the rare
moments of beauty and many other things that are only experienced while tending
to someone in their final days and hours.
For most of the year after Mom’s death I suffered from
PTSD-like symptoms. You see, when someone is getting ready to give up the
ghost, it’s not always so quiet and peaceful, although sometimes it can be.
But in Mom’s case, it wasn’t.
She held on for sixteen hours after the “rattle” started. The “rattle” is appropriately named because (1)
that’s what it sounds like and (2) that’s what it does to the nerves of anyone
within earshot. She had been in a
coma for two days by that point, and while her body was ready to go, I believe
her spirit was struggling with the imminent departure. I was alone with her for a good chunk of those final hours. I tried speaking to her – the
hospice nurses told me that hearing is the last of the five senses to go, and while no
one can be sure, there is a belief that the dying can still hear and understand what is spoken to them. It felt strange talking to someone whose only response was ragged breathing and loud
groaning. After a while I stopped
and just sat with her in silence, hoping that in some way my presence was enough to calm her spirit.
At one point I left the room to take a quick nap on the couch and when I
came back in the room, my two dogs were in bed with her, both of them crowding into
her lap. They knew, as well.
That final moment when Mom took her last breath was truly
the most horrific experience in my life thus far. That’s about all I can say about it because I still can’t
find the words to describe what bearing witness to that moment is like. The woman who gave birth to me, who
loved me with a fierceness that will never be matched by another human being,
who sacrificed so much for me…was now gone.
How does one even begin to describe what that feels like?
That became my struggle in the ensuing months. Well-intentioned people told me how
wonderful it was that I was with her at the end. And it was, truly. It would be over a year before I
could see it that way, however. I was
thoroughly traumatized by those final hours and it would take a long time,
several sessions with a therapist and ultimately going on an antidepressant
before I came to see that, despite all the pain, I would not have traded those weeks of caring for her for anything. When
I referred earlier to her spirit struggling to leave this world, I believe that
she was clinging to those final moments with me, not wanting to leave me. I told her over and over that it was ok
to let go, but her stubbornness was legendary and she was not going to go until,
to quote a phrase she used often, she was good and goddamn ready.
It’s coming up on two years since she passed and my life is
a vastly different place.
Everything – and I mean everything – is different. There is no part of my life that is
untouched, because everything I do now is in a world that she is no longer
physically a part of. I will no longer get that phone call at
12:08pm on my birthday – the exact time I was born – with her groaning on the
other end of the line as if she was in labor. While Christmas was never my favorite holiday, she always went overboard and I still cannot hear the song “Oh, Holy Night”, which she royally and
gleefully butchered, without tears coming to my eyes. Any accomplishment, any accolade that I
get now feels somewhat empty without her being here to react to it like I won a
Nobel prize. Even though I will
never have those things - or her - again, she has left a legacy that I will
always be able to see. I just have
to look in the mirror.
