Recently in Mom Category

Two years ago today, my mother succumbed to her metastatic lung cancer that had been diagnosed six months earlier. I was fortunate in that I was set up at work to be able to take a leave of absence and essentially move back to Ohio to care for her those last six weeks. I look back on that time as a whole, especially those last six weeks, and realize how much of a blur it all is but thankfully, I was able to blog through it so I have some uncorrupted memories. I still look back at that time and in a strange way, for the sadness and loss that it was, it was also something so significant that it couldn't help but change who I was; in subtle ways but change none the less. I'm better because of it and I guess that is the silver lining on the whole thing.

Now we're two years out and I have to confess that this anniversary sort of crept up on me. I'm otherwise engaged and focused with work and school and vacation then all the sudden today was here. It wasn't a bad day and it wasn't even as particularly sad in the way that last year seemed to be. I miss her every day and especially in the last couple of days with my promotion, I really wanted her to be around to be excited for me. I know wherever she is (and she's everywhere) that she knows and I know she would have been excited for me but it is a pale shade of really having her here and hearing her on the phone as I told her what happened. But really, that's more about me and what I need which is sort of selfish, really.

It would be impossible for me to not draw some comparison between her death and the horrifically drawn out ordeal of the Terry Schiavo case. There was some headline a few days ago from her mother pleading, "Don't let my daughter die of thirst!!" which absolutely turned my stomach at the hyperbole and drama of this whole thing. It actually infuriated me that the dying of Terry Schiavo has been so overly-exploited and twisted. I thought of all those people being arrested for trying to sneak water to her and keep her alive under any circumstances and all for what? For God's will? The case is obviously much more complex then anything I can say here but ultimately, I think you just have to be a first-person witness to the dying to know what is and is not true and to know that sometimes the hardest choices to make are learning about one's own selfishness and how to overcome that to let go when the time has come.

For my family and myself, when Mom was diagnosed and quickly decided that she was going to turn down chemo and radiation, palliative treatments that would have possibly extended her life for a bit longer than six months, it was the hardest choice she ever had to make and one that was equally hard for our family to accept but I never once thought that my Mom had ever given up. She never once rolled over and let her impending death overcome her will to live. She did however recognize and embrace the idea that we all have our time to live and die and sometimes you just take the time left and make the best of it. It was something that even saying I admire doesn't do it justice by half.

My mother visited me last night; a feat in and of itself since she’s been dead now for a year and a half. I’ve surprised even myself since she died because I’m about the only one I know of who she hasn’t come calling on in one way or another. I would have though of anyone, I’d be the one who would most fully feel and see my mother in the everyday waking world since I think I’m so open and accepting of that kind of non-logic but in reality, when Amber left the building, she left the building. Even when I went looking for her, she wasn’t there. I was beginning to resign myself to a life without her, even in my dreams, feeling somehow my wiring wouldn’t let me pick her up, even though in my mind, I was ready and willing for however she wanted to appear. Leave it to her to pull a trick like last night when I didn’t even realize I was dreaming or having the visit.

Though the dream is twisty and convoluted in the way dreams usually are with people melting into others and strange, cryptographic symbolism that I can’t figure out (the bridesmaids in her wedding were all told the theme was “greed” and came with soot on their faces and bobbed hair cuts with the ends dyed blue), the important part to realize was that I didn’t know I was dreaming which is rare for me. I can usually tell when I’m wrapped up in a dream, though I still can’t do much about it and suffer plenty with running in place scenarios and those kinds of things. But last night I was enjoying her wedding, her fourth one, and to a previous long-time boyfriend who in her living years she never married and who, coincidentally, died several months after her from the same lung cancer she did. Yes I found it strange she was dressed in periwinkle since she’s always been more of a violet-lover but the wedding was nice and everyone was happy and nothing seemed out of place. I spoke to her afterwards as she was sitting with her new husband, asking where they were going for their honeymoon. She told me Marti Gras and that’s when something changed for me. I told her that Marti Gras was in late February or early March and it’s only September. Was she sure they were going to Marti Gras? She couldn’t be going to Marti Gras because that doesn’t make sense and then the dream started to melt and she just looked at me and smiled and I seemingly woke up…on a train with my Dad. I was still trying to shake off the confusion about the honeymoon but I was even more confused as to how I’d gotten on a train and where we were going and how I couldn’t remember anything in the past. It was disconcerting in a way that had me starting to panic because my Dad just couldn’t answer me. I kept asking him how I got there and he kept asking me how I couldn’t know, so I got up and started to walk the train aisles and that’s when I found my Mom, standing around one of the corners, looking like she was waiting for me, and that’s when I knew she was gone and I was being visited. She looked the same as she always did to me, petite, tanned, thick, wavy brown hair and she was smiling.

“But you’re gone,” I said.
“Oh honey,” she snickered like the joke was on me. “It’s ok, you’ll get over it.”

And then she put on a big, wide brimmed straw hat with a purple bow tied around it and walked off down the train. Strangely, she’s not really a hat person.

I woke up just as the alarm was going off this morning, feeling like I’d gotten the best kind of visit because it wasn’t sorrowful and it wasn’t full of despair or relief or even the feeling that it was other-worldly. It felt like her playing a fun little trick: let’s show Beau something he’d like only to be ruined by my anxious curiosity to make sure everything was right and sensible, blowing the illusion away to reveal my Mom, as she had always been: humor and insight and exasperation with my never-ceasing anxiety fully intact. She always thought it was funny and a little sad at how worked up and over-wrought I’d become over the littlest, stupidest things. I was much too high-strung for her but of course, she smoked a lot of pot so a lot of people seemed that way to her, I think. Regardless, the visit was a pleasure for me. One of those rare treasures to put away and look at every now and again if for no other reason, then to remind me I’m not really as cut off from her as I think.

Of all the senses I like, and honestly I like them all, it’s my sense of smell I’m most dazzled by. Have you seen my nose? It’s huge and not much goes by that I don’t end up inhaling. In the city, I was ripe for pollution-induced allergies which miraculously, but unsurprisingly, cleared up after we moved to Bashert. I’m more responsive to smells and more likely to be knocked for a loop by a sudden smell triggering a deep memory than by just about anything else which I believe supports research’s supposition, showing over and over again, the powerful, synergistic connection between smell and memory.

Today was the first 70+ degree day and it was loaded with the smell of spring, finally. The cold, wet days we’ve had over the last month have kept most of the trees from greening up though the grass is getting verdant and the daffodils are up. They don’t have the sense of Job but then again, nothing kills them and the deer won’t touch them to save their winter-starved lives so they obviously know what they’re doing. While I was suppose to spend most of the day indoors reading about organizational behavior and management for school, eventually I had to close up the books and move outside to walk around the yard, kick around the limbs that need to be picked up and rifle through the flowerbeds, dreaming of what should go where and figure out how I’m going to manage all the work that needs to get done.

It was finally walking back to the house late this afternoon, pulling in deep fistfuls of warm, afternoon spring air that the memory struck me like a thunderbolt. Mom. If there was ever an Earth Mother/Wiccan/Mother Nature, it was my Mom. She was a woman of Spring and Summer unlike any other I’ve known. Really powerful and connected during those seasons…really alive and in her own way, verdant. She loved taking the whole day to mow her yard and putter around the flowerbeds or just sit out back and soak it in and get sun-kissed. The day I missed her most was the day after she died last year; an unseasonably warm, sunny, early spring day we spent outside on the back porch of her house with my family, flying kites and just really, really grieving in a way that at the time didn’t feel like grieving at all. It was one of those unbearable days that looking back was tinged with a wonderful, deep river of emotion that I find so hard to share, usually. It’s amazing to me how in that one instant of being outside this afternoon, I had a deep but immediate connection with Mom again. That was in and of itself as powerful and exhilarating as just being able to enjoy the first real day of spring. I live for days like today but I think everyone knows what I’m talking about. You only get that extraordinary New Spring exhilaration once or twice a year after being literally beaten down from the drawn out, gray days of a late, wet winter. I completely needed mine right now, today, so how weirdly, wonderfully, perfect.

I was debating even posting because as I explained to Jeff last night on the ride home, I think I've beat this dead horse to death (ba-dum-bump) but of course, time goes by and today ends up being the one-year anniversary of my Mom's death.

I miss her every day but honestly, while today was starting off OK, I figured I needed to give her a little more attention so I threw myself into all the writings from last year and now I'm all weepy looking at her picture. There is nothing more to be said then that...it's a weepy thing, even still.

But she would have been the last one to get all squishy about it, believe me, so I'm trying to get on with my day and plan for a little stone unveiling at the end of April for friends and family to honor her memory. Of course to really celebrate her memory, we'd all have to stand around drinking that piss-water she called wine from its box and getting high on home-grown weed, but I think we're going to go a bit more casual than all that this go around...at least for the sake of the more delicately-inclined of the family.

It seems almost impossible, I know, that pretty much all of a year has passed since my Mom died. I managed to save all the entries I'd written during her illness from last year and everyday I check in to see what I wrote, what new horrible thing was happening to her and to see if I had any hint at how short the days were really becoming. Tomorrow will be what I consider the beginning of the very fast slide out of this world for her. She'd already been diagnosed with tumor metastasis to her brain and we'd been doing a week of radiation to her hip for possible bone mets when she seized up in her chair that afternoon during an episode of "M*A*S*H" in front me and my brother Matt and his family. This is what I wrote last year:

"I don't think I can imagine witnessing one single worse acute event other than a grand mal seizure. A full out body-rattling, electrical storm that winds the muscles of the body so tight in constrictures you'd think you could just about hear bones getting ready to crack, not to mention the complete look of utter horror in their face with the eyes rolled back and the mouth drawn up into some wicked, maniacal grimace of what looks to be mind-blowing pain. I've had years of experiences with seizure patients and at first, it's one of those episodes which causes you to lose complete control of yourself and start yelling for someone to do something, anything, just to make it stop. That's the very problem with seizures: they are completely, utterly unstoppable once they start up and there is nothing you can do about it. They run their course and you're left standing by the wayside, watching. In the ER, we'd roll the patient to the side in case they started to vomit so they didn't aspirate and choke and we'd give them some meds, put them on some oxygen which is all secondary symptomatic treatment and not doing anything to limit the seizure time. You just learn to not panic and realize you have to ride out the storm, hard as it may be.

I say all this for this reason; I know anyone and everyone who's following this whole thing has been thinking and praying and hoping for whatever is appropriate to hope for in this situation. I'm telling this to show the story moves on. This is where we are now and we move forward, quicker than I thought. It's hard to explain but my new mantra for each day, to make each day count is "time grows short" and I can manage with that.

As it turns out, we had less than two weeks left which even then and now looking back was a blessing. She was literally well and walking one week, wheel-chair bound the next and dead two weeks later. That's a slicked down slide if I've ever heard one. By this time last year, I'd already painted her bedroom a strangely comforting but saddenly infuriating shade of lilac and lavender. I'd scrubbed her floors by hand with a brush almost every day and I'd baked what was probably my 15th or 16th loaf of bread because I was so powerless to do anything else.

It's a cliché to say how the time has flown over the last year but I can say, more truthfully than ever before, that's exactly the whole of it. The days simply melted away without her and now we're circling her death's year-anniversary. It's been a year that has been gearing up for me to get back up and start doing again so that's what I'm into. Her estate is coming to a close, finally, and her grave stone is ordered and should be ready in May and those were the last things I'd been holding onto not really wanting to let them go but knowing sometimes, you just have to call it a day and make do. And there is some REALLY good family news coming down the pike which makes the timing seem on the sweeter end but still bittersweet, none-the-less along with the day to day fizz of all of us waking up and shaking off the long, cold winter. Spring is coming, things get green, the world turns like always.