When we were in Southwest Harbor in October 1996 I was shocked at how emaciated my mother looked when they met us for lunch at Jordan Pond. Yet it didn’t register what the cause might be, as she breezily commented that she had “lost 25 pounds, Thank God”. It was one of those “Huh” moments that I have since learned to pay close attention to.
Mom was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer on November 3 of that year. She had been taken by ambulance to the hospital three nights previous, after Dad had come down to the living room with a bout of insomnia. He had found mom gasping like a fish out of water and unable to get up from her chair.
When she called me with the news that her cigarettes would indeed be the death of her, she told me that she would not go through the hell of treatment that may or may not prolong her life and certainly wouldn’t improve its quality.
At that time I was happily involved with assisting in Phil’s Cub Scout troop, but I was not expecting some of the higher ups to stop by on some scout related bureaucratic nonsense, and the last thing I wanted to do was pretend all was well immediately after receiving this news. I was a wreck and had taken flight to the corner of the living room.
When faced with a situation like this, you don’t know what to do. Drop everything and go? Wait to see what happens?… Beth and David decided they would go to Maine and scope out the situation, get the real story, knock some sense into her re: the necessity of pursuing every option.
I was the only one in my family of origin to initially support her decision to forego treatment. I had had the fantastic good fortune of a training for hospice volunteers by a student of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross back in the days when it was a fledgling movement. This was not the first time I felt blessed to have been given the tools necessary to more readily cope with this situation; or so I thought.
On my first visit to Maine following her diagnosis, I found that the living room had been transformed into a hospital room with electric bed, bedside table, oxygen tanks, commode, and set of coordinating pink bedpan, emesis basin, water pitcher and “dish” pan filled with toiletries that had become so very familiar during my own years as a hospital patient. My mother was a pack rat, and the last thing we needed was yet another set of this crappy plastic paraphernalia that I had been discharged and came home with dozens of times.
While I was with them, Dad and I took turns staying up nights with my mother. One night I asked Mom if she was afraid of dying. “Not really, just the actual process of getting there ”. Zoom I told her of my conversation with Mr. Snow while he was in the hospital; my request that he try to make contact after he passed, making the same request of her. “It will only be a whisper”, he had answered, while Mom responded, “Are you kidding?! When I leave here I’m never coming back!”
I knew she’d had a largely unhappy life, but was it all bad? and how much was I responsible for her misery? How much did she blame me? (A lot, I reckon.)
On my next vigil two nights later, I suggested to Mom that she have a long heart to heart with Dad; that if they did not resolve their innumerable issues before she died, he would be miserable for the rest of his life. On the second morning following this conversation, it was as though a huge cloud had lifted, (and indeed, the morning sun streamed through the living room window for the first time that week). Beaming, she announced that they had forgiven each other. I went
Two weeks later, Tony and I brought the boys to say Goodbye to their grandmother. She seemed to have achieved full acceptance of her pending death and was anxious to have some one on one time with each of her grandsons.
They each took turns dining with her off of the piano bench that had been set for two. Mom held the scantily filled out Grandmother Remembers book I had given to her years before. How I mourned that she hadn’t made more of an effort to leave my children a tangible part of herself. I eavesdropped on her as she read from it, talking about her years as a child, making a last-ditch effort to let them know her. We shared the regret that they didn’t really know one another. (My experience as a grandmother is not like that.
There is a photo of her with those sad, grieving boys during that visit in which the image of her appears to be fading, as though she is already between “here” and “there”. After their Final Goodbye, I listened night after night to Henry’s 10 year old self sobbing into his pillow. Mom and Henry had had a special connection and there was no question that his heart was broken.
Upon our return home, the boys wanted to make gifts for me to deliver to Nana when I went for Thanksgiving. They made Sculpey bead necklaces; and a wall hanging made of God’s Eyes in the shape of a cross superimposed on a background layer of God’s Eyes. It touched her so deeply that she couldn’t take her eyes off of it as it hung in the living room window. She saw it as a Guide to where she was going.
Thanksgiving was November 28 that year. I was shocked that none of my siblings had planned to spend that last Thanksgiving with our mother; it seemed such a no-brainer to me. My flight was late due to a snowstorm and Mom was in full-blown panic by the time I arrived in Pittsfield (no cell phones back then!). Having made this trip multiple times in inclement weather, it had not occurred to call again after the Boston call, when we landed in Bangor. She broke down when I entered the living room and wouldn’t let go of me for the longest time. I felt terrible.
Dad and I prepared Thanksgiving dinner together. While the turkey roasted, we chuckled as we cleared off a shelf in the basement full of glass jars my mother had collected for decades, for one never knew when one would need several hundred of them! Dad offered to peel the potatoes and proceeded to cut them first, thinking it would be easier to peel them in pieces! (To this day I wonder if he was serious or pulling my leg in order to get a rise out of me.)
Dinner was a tasteless lump in my throat as Dad tried to cajole Mom into eating a bite or two. “I said, I don’t. want. any!!”
On the flight back to Rochester I had a long layover in Boston, during which I gorged myself on lobster and got drunk at the Legal Seafood in the terminal; so comforting.
I prepared for one last trip to see Mom before she passed. I was the first of her children to arrive. As I sat in the livingroom reading, I looked up to see Mom gazing at me, searching my face for the answer to the question I feared she would ask. Three years previous, she had confronted me with my excessive drinking, at which time I went underground with the bottle. I had drunkenly attended numerous family gatherings since, but never taken a drink in their presence. “I took care of it,” I lied. I saw the relief of her being exonerated, washed over her face, and knew I had done the right thing.
Later that day as the others started arriving, she saw me watching her and told me in no uncertain terms to “Get out! I don’t want you here!” It was as though she had been waiting for the perfect moment to fling those very words back in my face, as I had done so many years earlier as she hovered at my hospital bed after a particularly horrendous bout of seizures.
I fled to my darkened bedroom and realized that I had been assigned the very bed (and blood-stained mattress) that I had cut my wrists on so long ago. I sobbed in the dark until my head felt as though it would explode, and Dad came up to reprimand me for being overly sensitive.
Those were the last words she spoke to me.
The next day I hung in the periphery as my siblings chit chatted amongst themselves, and Mom drifted in and out of consciousness. We knew the end was near, and everyone expected to arrive was there with the exception of the eldest grandchild. She waited for his arrival, and was so happy when Jeff finally arrived. “Jeffrey David, there you are! How’s your love life?”
She had all of her children and 3 oldest grandchildren with her; she could let go… She lost consciousness for the last time, and as the hospice nurse (a childhood friend of ours) arrived, the horrible death rattle began. The day was thick with dark clouds and it felt like dusk rather than early afternoon.
When she died that afternoon, Dad called the funeral home, and he and David oversaw the removal of her body while the rest of us dispersed throughout the house.
I was in a surreal fog. Not only had my mother rejected me once and for all, but I was also of the firm belief that as her spirit hovered before departing for good, she knew all of my secrets (that I was indeed an active drunk, among other things through the years) and hated me for them.
The next days passed in a blur, making the necessary phone calls and funeral arrangements;Tony and the boys’ arrival; shopping for funeral attire; the dream-like service; making chit chat with dear old friends at the reception put on by the ladies of the church. As people were starting to leave, two of the ladies approached with an angel candle holder/floral arrangement they had made, and wanted me to have. It felt like a message from beyond.
Mom died 17 days before Christmas, so we returned home to the hubbub of holiday preparations from which I was perfectly willing to disappear that year. I dove straight into the bottle.
The boys were in a community children’s Christmas production, and the last place I wanted to be was on the receiving end of heartfelt sympathy as people lined up to speak with me. One of the vignettes in the play involved the song Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, a song that played constantly that season, and I came to despise.
We took a very extended Ooh and Ah ride that year, and all I could do was to obsess over the way things had ended between me and my mother, convinced that in the end I was a huge disappointment and failure, to not only my own mother, but to all of the people I cared about.
The following Mother’s Day, my sons worked hard digging a deep hole in the front yard, in which to plant a beautiful young maple in her honor. It seemed a perfect tribute and remembrance.
We buried Mom that following June. The minister with whom I associate the most significant events in my childhood life, whom David had gone to live with at age 16, had given my younger sisters and I pet rabbits, and performed Beth’s and David’s marriage rites, emerged from our past to do the internment in Wildwood Cemetery.
I did not go back to Maine until the following October. It had been 10 months since Mom had died. Dad had emerged from his own Hell following her death.
We did the usual things, watched favorite tv shows, went to Borders, read companionably in the living room with strains of classical music drifting through the house, talked of life without Mom. The house seemed so different without her presence. It was Dad’s home now. I was so proud of him for creating a new life for himself, nurturing new friendships, carrying on.
Dad gave me a cd that I had fallen in love with during that visit. I took it home with me and played it constantly even as it tore my heart out and I sobbed continuously for weeks. I finally broke free of the impenetrable barrier I had encased myself in.
I came to the belief that my mother’s spirit was pure Mother Love, without all of the anger and resentment and disappointment we had each carried with us for so long; and that it was time for forgiveness. 11-25-14