My mother gave me a lot. She taught me how to enjoy and appreciate reading, learning and music. She was not meant for poverty, not meant for the life she ended up living. She was a gentle soul with a lot of heart, but too much in her head held her back.
She made me who I am today, partially from my desire to never be like her. But the good qualities in her are coming out little by little in me, especially now that I have Madeleine. My mother never wanted a child and sometimes I felt she never wanted me, though I do know that she did her best with what she didn’t have and managed to keep herself together enough while I was growing up to get me off to a good college where I could start living my own life. I realized that she had been living for me when she quit law school and lost the house.
It left me feeling very conflicted because I was at the point where I was ready to break away and start following my own path. At the same time, I knew that she wasn’t taking care of herself and needed help. But I wasn’t in a position financially or mentally to do that. I was learning who I was, what I wanted, and what was important to me. And while I know she wanted me to stay in Eugene with her, I knew that I couldn’t do it without sacrificing my dreams and my well being. It would have left me even more resentful. But then, if I’d stayed, would her life have been different in the end? Would it have been better? And would mine have been worse or just different?
When I had Madeleine, I knew that I wanted to be a better mother to her than my mother was to me. I wanted to make sure she felt safe, loved, and free to experience life with all of its amazing twists and turns while feeling like she had a good home base to come back to. I wanted her to feel like she was supported in whatever she wanted to do and that life was an adventure to be lived and not something to shrink or hide from. I also wanted to shield her from the things in my mother that I knew made her weak.
But I wanted to instill in her my mother’s love for music, for reading and learning. And now that my mother is gone, I hope that I can find a way to teach Madeleine what my mother taught me, while passing on to her the realization that this is a gift from her grandmother, even though she is not here to do it herself.
My mother never liked to confide in me mostly because she knew that I would worry and feel guilty because I couldn’t do anything to fix it. I knew that something was wrong last Christmas when Leigh and I visited her, even just briefly for the holiday. She was losing weight, which was a good thing in her case, but she also was weak and bent from back pain. Then in July, just before Madeleine was born, she was even more drawn and thin. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong until the week after Maddie was born and then she told me that she had been diagnosed in May with advanced pancreatic and liver cancer. I knew something was wrong with her health, but I didn’t expect it to be so devastating. With my medical knowledge, I understood that was a death sentence and one that would come quickly. She told me that they had given her 6 months to 2 years survival time. My mom was trying to be optimistic, that her doctor was the best oncologist in Eugene and had fought her insurance company (the government) to get her enrolled in a new chemotherapy study. And that they were doing everything they could to make her comfortable and extend her life.
After she left that day, I cried like a baby and wished that my mother’s optimism was well-founded. I started making plans to spend Thanksgiving with her and kept my fingers crossed that she would still be here. I also stressed about when I would be able to get down to spend time with her. But while Madeleine and I were bonding and struggling with the breastfeeding, I knew that travel, even just down to Eugene, just wasn’t going to be possible for awhile. Finally, when Maddie was 6 weeks old, in early September, I decided I needed to make the trip and couldn’t put it off any longer. I could at least help out buying groceries or taking her to the doctor, even if I couldn’t stay with her or do much else for her while I fulfilled my responsibilities to Maddie.
The day that I arrived, I could see she looked so very tired. She was having significant vomiting spells. I left her that day with the promise that I would do grocery shopping for her the next day and that I would take her to her doctor’s appointment the day after. She called me less than 3 hours later and told me that she needed me to come get her to go to her doctor and I needed to hurry.
They drew blood and told her to go home and wait for the results the next day. That frustrated me, especially seeing just how weak and uncomfortable she was. When I drover her home, I tried to make her promise that she would either call me or 911 if she got any worse. I don’t think I really trusted her to be able to take any kind of care of herself, she seemed so weak. The next day, I couldn’t get ahold of her and had visions of her dead or passed out on the floor somewhere at home. I discovered, finally, that she called 911 late that night. I finally found her at the hospital that afternoon after worrying and worrying when I couldn’t reach her at home. You never really expect to call the hospital, ask if your loved one checked in by chance and have them say, “why yes, she came in early this morning…”
Two days later she had a stroke and 8 days later she was gone. She was certainly mentally gone well before that and physically, she was only a shell. The last days were painful for me emotionally, definitely they were exceptionally painful for her, but thankfully I had a lot of support from my good friend Emily and Leigh who was able to get time off from work. Thankfully, too, my aunt Sherri and Uncle Scott were good enough to put up with me camping out at their house for two weeks. While they were out of town, my cousin Kailee was moving back in with her husband and son and was able to keep me company and help raise my spirits.
I was constantly torn between my desire to be with Maddie and my desire to spend time with my mother and make sure she was comfortable. She was her stubborn self until the very end, which meant that the hospital had to post a nurse’s aid with her around the clock so she wouldn’t try to get out of bed. In her state, she was not steady physically and fell at least once before they put the 24-hour watch on her. She was frustrated with her inability to communicate and that made the last days all the more difficult.
I did what I could to be her advocate and to make sure she wasn’t forgotten, especially after listening to Emily’s experience with her mom in the hospital and in hospice. It’s not that the nurses don’t care, but I watched them hurry around between all of their various patients and understood how things can fall through the cracks. Initially, they all relied on my mother to be able to them when or if she was in pain. That just wasn’t working; I could see how restless and edgy she was. I harassed and harangued the nurses to stay on top of her pain, but it took me and the social workers at least 4 or 5 days before the nurses understood what I was after and how to treat her. I watched as each different nurse and aide interacted with my mother and knew instantly which ones would drive her crazy and which ones would make her comfortable. None of them would fully be able to get her cooperation, but some came closer than others. And it made me appreciate what the end for all of us might bring, a lack of control.
I called as many of her friends as I could and my uncle, who had lost touch with her, because I didn’t want my mother to be alone in the hospital. I knew that I couldn’t be there all day and night, though I wished that I could. And I hope that I was able to facilitate some good-byes for her in the end, even though she wasn’t able to speak.
Those last days, which seemed surreal to me then, were spent on automatic pilot, but even once they were over and we had cleared out her house, I found that I didn’t really feel like crying. We whittled her life down to a small 5×5 storage unit. Most of her belongings went either to the dump or to Goodwill, which made me realize how much crap we really don’t need. This is what will happen to each and every one of us when our children or our families go through our belongings after we pass into the ether. I found myself comforting my mother’s friends far more than they were comforting me and I realized it was because I had been expecting this, and because I had done much of my grieving right after she told me about her diagnosis, while I was nursing and getting to know Madeleine.
I will always be hit at odd points, during odd conversations, and feel a surge of loss that will surprise me, but for a long time afterwards, I didn’t have the tears. Part of that lack of grief was the relief to get back home after two weeks of being away, and the desire to get to enjoying my time with Madeleine. Because she was my all-consuming focus and I was so happy to be able to get back to providing her with the attention she needed and hadn’t been able to get while I was in Eugene saying goodbye to my mother.
I was driving to work today, listening to NPR when Richie Havens started singing Here Comes the Sun. His gravelly voice reminded me of my mother because she loved his music and I couldn’t help but cry. If she had let herself accept that music wasn’t going to pay her bills, it might have offered her some of the solace she was looking for. There are a lot of things about her that I don’t know and never will know. She didn’t often let me in on a great many of the troubling things that kept her from living a normal life, one where she could have kept her house and been able to retire in peace and comfort. I hope now that she will be able to rest in peace, that she realizes that what was so painful down here on earth really didn’t need to be. And I hope that I did right by her in the end and that she forgives me for all the times that I didn’t give her the understanding that she so often needed.
