Remembering pt. 1

This morning, I prepare to say my last goodbyes to my mother. Tonight, her family will come to her home to celebrate her life. They will come to the home where she died. A few nights ago, I listened to her take her last agonizing breaths. And tonight so many people will be in that intimate place. They will see the things she left, touch them, take some part of her with them to comfort their sorrows. There is a rational part of me that knows they need that. And there is a part of me that feels like we - my siblings, her parents and siblings, those who were there that night to let her go - are being invaded.

As her daughter, my experience of her death is different from her mother's, or her brothers', or sisters'. I wonder if it was any easier for her to leave than it is for us to let her go. She'd decided a couple weeks before she died that she would start taking morphine. The pain was unbearable, she said. And I think she knew that the morphine would allow her to go. She saw it as a way out. And we all supported her. But, even after she told us, she waited. She hesitated for days and days. Finally, she asked us to come and meet with her again. She told us she was starting the morphine, and this time it wasn't someday, she told us she was starting that night. I wasn't sitting where she could see my face, and I was glad for that. I was hurt, and surprised. Isn't it strange how we can know something is coming, know it, and still be blindsided when it finally comes? 

The next morning, she was groggy. In and out, and mostly out, but still in a great deal of pain. I told her to not be stubborn, and we laughed. I told her it was ok to go, that my kids would be ok. I told her that I'm not like her, and she told me that I'm more like her than I know. Just as I was leaving, she grabbed my hand and asked if I'd be back later. I reassured her I would be, and she said she'd try to be there when I came back. I immediately told her not to do that, but that I would be back. "Love, love," I told her, and she replied, "Love more." And those were our last words to each other. 

When I came back later that afternoon she was unconscious. Her lungs were filling up with fluid, and it made a gurgling, wheezing sound with each breath she took. I laid by her in bed, listening to her labored breaths on and off all afternoon. Her sister and brothers were there to give her the morphine and watch her vitals. My uncle Tom sat on the other side of her at one point and we told each other stories about Mom. One of the nurses had been rubbing peppermint oil on her temples for pain management, and the smell was in her hair. At one point I buried my face in her shoulder, and I could smell her again, not the oil, just her.