Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Thinking Out Loud

Part of my long, drawn-out silence here is due to my mother's sudden passing. She died on September 25, unexpectedly, of a hemorrhage in her lower GI tract. It was an awful way for her to die and, judging by the way she left the world, she wasn't expecting it either. She had been reading in bed around midnight, munching on some butter cookies, when, I imagine, she felt the urge to use the bathroom, and she got up to use it and never left.

I know that much at least because when I went into her apartment a day later, her bedside reading lamp was still burning, her covers were carefully folded back--just enough for her to calmly swing her legs out of bed, and not disrupt the tin of butter cookies lying next to the book, which was placed face-down in order to save her place (she was reading Breaking Dawn, the final installment of the Twilight series).

My mother agreed to babysit for me on Friday afternoon since Pa and I had an appointment later in the day to see a photographer and review pictures he had taken of the family. When I called her an hour before I was scheduled to pick her up, the line was busy. I thought nothing of it until I tried 30 minutes later. I picked Audri up from preschool and we drove over to my mom's apartment. The first wave of panic hit me when I used the buzzer and she didn't respond. After waiting for a few minutes, the mail man let us inide the building. My second wave of panic--which was more like a tsunami--was when I knocked at her door and she didn't answer. I knew she was in there. I knew she was dead. I was too afraid to go inside. Besides, I had Audri in tow.

I called Pa at his office and he told me to pick him up. We drove to our house where he dropped us off. About 20 minutes later, he called to tell me what I had already known. What was worse, though, was the scene he described. She bled everwhere.

For the first few days, I was in too much shock to actually realize my mother was dead. Even after I left my mother's apartment the next day--having grabbed anything that was valuable to our family--and seeing the wake of her trauma, I was more upset by the way in which she died then the fact she was gone. The permanence of it all hadn't yet registered.

By Wednesday of last week, we were able to say our final goodbyes to her in a funeral home before she was cremated. I didn't want her embalmed because it seemed like such a wasteful thing to do; and so the funeral director placed her on a gurney and put a very pretty quilt over her body so that we only saw her head. At first, I was prepared to see something very gruesome and so I didn't want the children to see her until I did first. But everything was fine. In fact, she seemed more at peace than I had ever seen. Every single worry line and crevice on her face was gone.

Seeing her was the turning point between mourning over the horrible way in which she died and coming to grips with the fact that she was gone. The pit in my stomach grew wider, though I was still in tactical mode. By Friday, we had cleared out her apartment completely and donated everything to Goodwill.

Now that I've shifted out of tactical mode, I'm left with my emotions. I've found that if I try and shut out my thoughts during the day, they haunt me at night in my sleep. They wake me until I'm fully conscious.

And so, this is part of my grieving process -- writing about it helps me as I try and make sense of it all. It may take awhile.

My mother was a good person with a heart of gold, but she wasn't always the best mother. Too often, she had let her own thoughts eat away at her as she struggled to cope with the losses in her life. She also made some poor choices in life, which profoundly affected me and my siblings. She never sought help or spoke to anyone about her demons, and she thought she could take care of things herself, even up to the very end, as evidenced by the towel she used to try and clean up the blood she was losing.

But I loved her all the same because...well...because she was Mom and because I don't blame her for her shortcomings. She did the best she could and that was all anyone could ask for.

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