Mother Death

I didn’t say goodbye to her-couldn’t say goodbye to her. She had C-dif, a highly contagious- bacteria? Something bad, so we couldn’t touch her without being shrouded in disposable blue gowns and those plastic gloves that make you wonder if they are at all protective. My mother had the horrific diagnosis of ovarian cancer -the numbers being stage 4 at 82. She lived maybe another year-I have to compute back to figure out when she died-I guess I am blocking it out but I DO recall she was born in 1924 so I’ll get around to doing the math-if I can handle that. I have so many regrets, but I was able to be with her the last 3 weeks of life, if you can call it that. The chemo wasted her, and she was a scrap of her former beautiful self-swollen and proceeding each day to more vacancy. But present enough to say she wanted to be resuscitated if her heart stopped. I think she thought she could make it to her grandson’s wedding. I tried to talk about ‘What if the treatment doesn’t work’ but she steered away from that on a day when we were able to have more or less normal conversation. The hospitalist came into her room and pretty much told her that she was at the “this is it point.” I left the room to get my sister, giving my mother time to adjust to the fact that he had recommended a transfer to the hospice floor, which was, I am almost ashamed to say, a sigh of relief to me. Minutes, only minutes later my sister and I entered the room to a frail little lady fluttering her eyes-opening, closing lashes again and again. The nurse came in-kindly looking into the face of a woman gasping for air and providing oxygen to ease the stress. I felt like a deer in the headlights-stone faced, dry eyed and outside the whole developing picture. My sister cried. We couldn’t touch her. Kiss her. Hold the hand of this strange little shriveled lady who used to be our mother.