Mom Is Dying! Post #9

Mom was dying! Yet, I found myself feeling like I had won the lottery. Certainly, it was not because I was losing Mom; or, because we stood to have any significant inheritance. To tell this story, I must weave the history of the past four years and do my own ‘north vs. south’ experience.

Mom had lived in Panama City until her surgery. The plan was that she would be in the hospital for three days, rest for two weeks and then back to work. But thanks to so-called health insurance, her care was based solely on what would benefit the insurance company.  In an effort to rush Mom out of the hospital, they pulled a tube prematurely that was draining fluid from her brain the day after she had surgery to have an aneurysm clipped. My sister, a nurse, warned them that the tube was not ready be removed and was assured it wouldn't be pulled until the fluid drained.  Three hours later, the next visiting hours, the tube was gone. They were told the insurance company didn't deem it necessary.

Throughout the day, Mom stopped talking and began sleeping more. By evening she was unresponsive. We were called from NY as Mom had slipped into a coma. However, insurance doesn’t call it a coma if the nurses and doctors can pinch your breasts, leaving black and blue marks, and get any type of response. So, it was not an insured coma! Mom came out of her non-insured coma seven weeks later as an invalid with her mind in tact.

We decided to bring her to her sister’s house in Ohio (centrally located for her children) where we would rotate one month shifts to care for her. When Sally, my step-mom, fell ill with terminal cancer, we decided to move Mom again to Pulaski, NY where both could be in the same town to manage the care. Mom spent the next three years there, a place she had never adjusted to. 

         My feelings of gloom, doom and isolation during late fall and winter mirrored hers. Mom was a person who, like most southerners, knew no strangers and NY just did not offer an environment for that type of social interaction.     Many times during the coldest, darkest months of the year, I would look at Mom and think, “Well! If this isn’t the suck of all sucks!!!” Here she was,  still with a home in Florida, a total invalid with no choices in her life, and she had landed back in NY, the place she tried so hard to escape. There were a couple of times during those two years that Mom ended up in the hospital. 


          During those times, the sky was always gloomy and grey and the weather wet and cold.  The hospitals are in the University section and the students alone and their purposeful ugliness can throw you over the edge into insanity!   Now, I’m not trying to be mean here but SU students must try to look ugly! Many times while living there, co-workers and I went to the university area for lunch and were shocked at how each kid is uglier than the next. Apparently,  it is trendy to jump out of bed and head straight out the door without showering, or brushing their teeth or hair.  They're just filthy and it seems to be on-purpose, though I’m not sure what purpose!  And these are wealthy kids!

          Now, take that thought and put yourself in my shoes here: You are not there for lunch with co-workers, rather between ICU visiting hours, wondering if your loved one will live or die. You are surrounded by dozens of zombie-like college students who look like they already died! Outside it is cold, snowy, windy, drizzly, wet, with dead, skeleton-looking trees, and you are so utterly exhausted, on the verge of hallucinating. The grey skies are suffocating and everything that surrounds you reinforces the doom and gloom concept, sucking what little energy you have left!

         In November of 2007, my sister, brother and I loaded Mom into her van and drove her back to Florida to live with our other sister. I still lived up north and, just breathing in the salty ocean air and seeing the emerald green coast once again reminded me that I had to move. I was happy that Mom was back to the place she so loved. It was less than a year later that she had her last dance with illness.

I had moved to Mobile in June, 2008.  When mom's health took a downturn in early fall, I went back and forth from Mobile to Panama City. Again, Mom was in ICU and this time, we knew she was going to die. Yet, I still felt I had won the lottery! 

        There was an inner peace that filled me every time I walked out of the hospital and was surrounded by everything that Mom loved; the sun, the Palm trees, the night sky chocked full of stars, the gardens, and best of all, the ocean. Our breaks between visiting hours were spent walking the beaches, eating at beach-side cafes and going to all the places that Mom loved.

Every few days I went back to Mobile, a place that is like living in a tropical garden, one that Mom – though she never got to see - would have loved. It was here that I could renew my energy to go back. 

         On every trip home,  neighbors and friends brought food, gifts, flowers, or just visited. A young woman from church called every couple of days, came over for lunch, invited me to coffee, and walked with me through this part of my journey. Many times, I sat on my porch with Spooky by my side, thinking of what Mom and I would do to the yard, the house, and the building across the street, if she were here and we owned them. I would walk through the gardens of Mobile or the beaches that run the coast from Panama City to Gulf Shores, Alabama, all the types of places Mom loved and shared with us. Many times, I remembered conversations we had had, at that very place, yet in another time. Talks about education, careers, love, sex, marriage, men, babies, decorating, gardening, politics, UFO’s, life on other planets, ghosts, life, and death; nearly everything under the sun.

As the end of Mom’s life was nearing and I was forced to say goodbye to my best friend and biggest fan (as I am hers), I realized, I had won the lottery! How sad it would have been if she died in a place where she never was at home. How sad for us to have had to suffer the gloom and doom that the fall months in Syracuse offers, in a time when we were already experiencing loss. Yet here I was, in the place that she and I both love. Every time we left the hospital, it was as though Mom were there too, doing all the things that she loved. It connected me to Mom in a way that I could not have in NY, where the chasm between life and death is not very wide at all. It brought Mom closer to me in a time when I was losing her. Yes! I have won the lotto! I've won it indeed!