Grieving over the loss of a parent

My mother is dead.  Three weeks and two days.  Her funeral was very sweet – almost joyful.  Sparsely attended, but so many of her friends were waiting on the other side.  Three weeks and two days.  And still it seems a bit unreal.

I am no longer walking under water, but the feeling has not returned to all my limbs.  I am not yet fully present to joy or to sorrow.  There have been no tears, but I did not expect any.  I had done my grieving for many months as I watched her drift away from herself and me.  The few flashes toward the last that reminded us all of who she was seemed fake – staged almost – as if she were saving up little bits here and there to present when the moment seemed right.  I was so taken aback when these moments occurred that I almost did not know what to say.

Three weeks and two days.  Her apartment is not empty yet.  That begins in earnest over the coming weekend – furniture to her niece’s home, to the church and to our home.  Dresser drawers of intimate things to go through and dispose of.  Cabinets of kitchen items to decide to keep or to let go.  The clothes were easy – someone else can surely use them.  But the dishes my father bought for her before the married?  Not so easy even as my cabinets are already overflowing.

Three weeks and two days.  There are thank you notes to be written for memorials, for food, for kind thoughts and helpful deeds.  I have not been able to start these yet even as I know that is rude of me.  My pen is not yet capable of smiling though my heart is beginning to do so.  It is almost amusing to hear myself tell others that I am “fine” in the same tight voice Mother used with me for months when I asked her how she was doing.  Yes, I am my Mother’s daughter in so many ways.

Three weeks and two days.  In the presence of the Lord, singing with the angels and the archangels, surrounded by friends and family, with my Father and all the beautiful cats they so loved while here!  The roses and glads that Daddy grew so beautifully in his garden here, even more splendid in that Garden of unending light.  The fulfillment of all her hopes, prayers, dreams and joys there in her eternal life.  And it seems only an instant to her!

Three weeks and two days.  If my lifetime here is as long as hers, I am two thirds of the way through – only one third left to get it right.  To be my Mother’s daughter in all of the faithful ways that she tried to teach, but with, I hope, more fun, more smiles, more joy. 

Written in one of Mother’s Bibles was the quote from someone famous that she had heard:  When you get ready to die, be sure that is all you have left to do.  I’ll try, Mother, I really will try.  I promise.

June+

Reflections on Mother's dying and death

The first phone call came at 6:11 am. Mother was having great difficulty breathing but the nurse said that she had been given some medication to help. She did not think I needed to come, but she would call me back if anything changed. The feeling of dread hatched a huge egg in my chest and everything seemed suddenly to be in black and white. The color drained out of the bedspread, the clothes hanging over the door, the morning light coming into the bedroom. I struggled to get back to sleep for another hour or so.

The second call came as Kent and I were having a late breakfast in our favorite little diner. The smell of bacon and sausage was in the air, and the biscuits on my plate were just perfect. We were discussing what we needed to do and trying to sequence the errands by geography and closing times. The voice on the phone said I hate to tell you but your mother just expired. Expired? Like a coupon? Did she deflate? Oh. You mean she died. “I beg your pardon” came out of my mouth. Your mother … she expired about ten minutes ago. I could see my husband’s hand coming across the table taking mine. We are waiting on the Hospice Nurse to call the time. Do you want us to delay so you can see her or go ahead and contact the funeral home?

For a moment I could not breathe. The call I had prayed for, dreaded, knew was inevitable had come – just a few seconds and it was over. The decisions were now mine to make alone. The struggle was done. Mother was already in her eternal home, seeing all of the glory of God that she has believed and taught me to trust. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Kent knew by the look on my face what had happened and he took all the errands off the table, even though most were his and were important. His calmness and matter-of-fact attitude steadied me. We finished our breakfast, greeted some friends who were leaving the diner and headed to Mother’s house, making the necessary phone calls in route.

Several times during the ride, I reminded myself to breathe as I was not sure that I had done so. The running phrase in my head – my mother is dying – became my mother is dead. The word “dead” sounded artificial and jagged. My tongue found it heavy and hard to say. Dead. A blessing and a grief. The end here and the beginning of joy there. Nothing more to be done – could be done.

Reflections on Mother's dying - honoring thy father and thy mother

Standing at the door to Mother’s bedroom, the biggest thing I see is her hospital bed.  It seems to suck up all the floor and air and wall space leaving only a tiny fringe for walking around her.  This is not really true if you measure it out, but it feels that way to me.  Never has that room felt so small.
    Such a big bed – such a tiny Mother.  She was never a large woman, standing only 5’ 2” at her tallest, and weighing at most 135 lbs.  But she has lost four inches in height and many more pounds.  Holding her hand or touching her face, I feel only skin and bones, not much flesh.  Her skin is dry and cool, but smooth.  The bones feel hard and strong, yet insubstantial, almost weightless.
    This is the ending that she did not want – lying in bed, barely aware of her surroundings, unable to do anything for herself and spending the most money ever in her life for personal care and medicines.  She would be horrified if she comprehended what is happening!  She would have chosen quick and cheap, not wasting money on palliatives that comfort, but change nothing.  She is a child of the Depression and hated waste as much as excess and unproductive expenditures.  Her diminishing bank balances would make her crazy!
    She is so tiny.  The woman who could make my blood run cold with a mere glance now barely sees me.  The voice that could stop me in my tracks just by calling my name now sounds small and hoarse.  Her way was always the only way no matter the task – and usually she was right.  She was competent and efficient in her career and precise in all the beautiful garments she made for me as I grew up.  I wore one suit jacket that she made from junior high all the way through college – and it would still be in style if I had not worn it out.  Her hands were always busy, her mind was always sharp.  Now her hands pluck at the bed covers in anxiety and futility, and her mind only occasionally focuses on what is going on around her. 
    My formidable mother is now tiny.  Tiny and helpless, dependent on a revolving cast of very kind caretakers.  Her companions leave nothing to chance and try every day to interest her in conversation or going outside – and rarely now do they succeed.  But gone is the rapid click – click of her heels on the floor, the power of her presence to compel my behaviors, the sureness of those eyes in the back of her head in seeing everything I did, especially when I did not want her to!  Now she is tiny and I have to be the strong one, asking the questions and paying the bills.  It just does not feel right.  It feels very sad and lonely.
    Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother…   Sometimes that means just showing up.  Holding a cool, restless hand.  Reminding her who I am simply because I know who she is even as she is so changed.  The waiting is hard for her and for me.  She is just so tiny lying there.  I must show up so that we can wait together – she so tiny in that big bed.

June+

Reflections on my Mother's dying

The voice on the phone said your mother’s heartbeat is slowing down.  She has entered the active dying phase.  I suddenly felt like I was under water – every movement dragged, the words came out slowly, my mental processes felt like they were running on glue.  It has been several days and I still feel like that – as if I am walking under water, pushing for each move.
    There is so much to do – getting papers together, getting my own house in order so that I am prepared for the time away, writing the obituary.  I am getting none of that done.  The tape in my head is running over and over – Mother is dying, Mother is dying.
    I am surprised by the overwhelming sense of sorrow that surrounds every moment.  In the cycle of grief, maybe this is the acceptance phase.  Mother is dying – it is happening right this minute and I can do nothing to delay it, nor do I know exactly when she will leave us.  I am not ready and I don’t know what to do to be ready.
    Going through an end table while I was with her, I found a journal that I gave her years ago.  This journal asked her questions about her childhood and young adult years –what she liked and hated, what she wore and where she liked to go.  All the pages are blank.  Mother was always a very private person, reticent to talk about her growing up or her inner life.  One of my hopes has been that we could break through some of that barrier before she dies.  It will not happen.
    The deep sorrow for me is that Mother is dying without my really knowing her as an adult.  We are still mother and child.  I don’t know her, but she also does not know me either.  My questions will never be answered.  I have few stories to tell of her after her death, and that seems to me to be a second dying.  Memories connect us with our past and enrich our future, and I feel stranded without these bridges.
    So what do I do while I am waiting?  Continue walking.  That is all that I can do and all that I am given to do.  Friends have rallied around, and my prayers are reaching the heart of God as a place is prepared for my mother’s eternity.  I wait.  I struggle under the weight of sadness, knowing that others have walked this path before me and will come after me.  I try to remember Mother when she was active and beautiful, when she laughed and smiled, when she was a woman in charge of her world.  But the sorrow is still there, every moment.  It feels as if I am drowning even as I breathe in and breathe out.

June+

During the last few visits I have had with my mother, she has surfaced briefly if at all.  I have felt mostly useless and left out of her dying process because she has not spoken to me or responded to my voice.  While that is understandable, it is painful – almost a noir comedy feeling of “my mother has left the building” without the laugh track. 

In finding the suit for her burial and setting it aside for her caretakers, I was reminded again that my mother – and my father, for that matter – taught me a great deal about personal vanity.  Mother’s closet is full of color – rich purples, bright reds and blues, lots of lovely pastels.  Her shoe rack has reds, silvers and golds on it as well as the usual navy-white-black-tan river running through it.  Mother held the expectation that she would look nice for herself even if no one else cared.
  

Her hair – so dark in her youth, is now greatly silvered, but not white.  She always kept it cut, permed and neat, going to Melinda twice a week to be sure it looked nice.  When she fell and a circle of hair had to be shaved to do the few stitches she needed, the wound was on the back of her head.  Melinda carefully tended that wound until it healed, giving Mother the shampoos she needed but making sure to comb as much cover as she could over the area –you would never have seen the “hole” as Mother called it.
This week something of the old vanity has stirred in Mother.  Her caretakers give her a shampoo often when they give her a shower, and then they blow dry her hair using a round brush.  But Mother suddenly woke up and said that she wanted her hair to be done by a “professional” – and that was the word she used.  By a professional.  We have duly made the appointment and a stylist will come to her.  

This flowering of the woman –  not the mother – that I have always observed felt good even if it is a single blossom.  I heard myself laughing as the caretaker relayed her request.  It felt almost as if she had shouted, “honey, I’m home!” and I heard the echo of the screen door slamming behind her from my childhood.  That kitchen door swing shut with a sharp sound was a regular part of our comings and goings in my childhood.  When we sold the house a few years ago, we found that we did not even have a front door key as accustomed as we were to that back entrance.  Home was through the kitchen door always.
There is an old Gospel song that talks about “stepping on shore, finally home…stepping on shore, finding it Heaven.”  Soon she will.  And her hair will look good for her homegoing.

June+

Lately two friends have made interesting comments to me as we have discussed my mother’s dying.  One friend said to me, “You are a priest.  You know about these things and how to handle them.”  The other said, “You are not the priest here – you are the chief mourner.”  Both phrases have been circling in my head.

Yes, I do know about “these things”.  I have stood with friends and strangers around a hospital bed when a loved one dies.  I have read studies about death and dying.  I have conducted graveside services.  I have read the Scriptures and know that our dying is in God’s hands just as is our living.  I know the stages of grief.  But knowing is not the same as experiencing.  I am neither a statistic nor a text.  I am a daughter.

As my mother dies, I sometimes sit by her bed in my priestly shirt because I have come there from our services.  But sitting in that chair, I feel like a daughter watching her mother row away from shore in a very fragile canoe and without a backward glance.  My mother, the source of my earthly body, is rowing toward my Father God, who is the root of my very being.  But I cannot go with her.  


I find myself thinking a lot less about where my mother is going – that is assured by her faith and evidenced in her life of service to her church.  But this is MY mother and she is going away from ME, going to a place that I cannot visit before I set out in the same fragile canoe.  There will be a separation between us that is irrevocable in this earthly life.  In my faith, we do not worship our ancestors or believe that their ghosts haunt our world.  Her spirit will be separated from mine by the abyss of temporary time and space.

More than that, all the unresolved issues will remain unresolved, photos that I find unidentified, and stories lost.  The rewind button disappears.  I am sad that we never became friends as adults because she is leaving without hearing my stories too.  As a priest I know that God holds all of these feelings tenderly in loving hands.  As a daughter I mourn the passing of my “daughter-hood”.  Soon I truly will stand alone on the precipice, knowing that I am the last verse of many unsung songs.

She goes, I stay.  She will see the full glory of God, and I await the coming of God’s glory.  All is in the mercy and love of God.  But still…she goes.

June+

Reflections

Yesterday I chose the clothes for my mother for her burial. A pink suit with a white blouse and earrings. She has dark skin and hair, and has always looked good in reds and pinks. My father liked color “on his women” as he used to say of my mother and me. He was very careful of his appearance and expected us to be the same.

Mother went back to work when I was two years old. This was not a choice of ego or career pursuit – or even of a passion for what she did. She worked because we needed the money. My father was a textile foreman and mother worked as a secretary in the mill office.

She was always proud of her job – proud that her skills at typing and shorthand were excellent, proud that she could spell and produce letters that were grammatically correct, proud that her files were in order and accessible for needed information. Mother is smart and she worked hard to be the best secretary she could be. She understood the value of secretaries in business – she was never just a secretary, she was a Secretary and proud of it!

All during my public school years, my mother drove me and two friends to school each day. I was aware that my mother was wearing a suit and earrings when she dropped us off, not a housedress or robe, because she was on her way to work. She always looked pretty. As a little girl, it was the earrings that were the most important for me, and in early grammar school I went through a period of sneaking earrings to school and putting them on at recess. My teachers, of course, were not pleased so that did not last long!

When I picked out her burial clothes yesterday, earrings were part of the outfit. Earrings had to be a part of it. She would not look herself to me without them. But the choosing was difficult. Mother was always so independent and self-contained. She kept her hair done and her colors matched. She would not go out her front door unkempt. Now she has no choices. Others bathe her, choose her clothes and comb her hair.

Now I am choosing for her how she will appear at the last. And I am grieving for the feisty, independent, pretty woman who wore a cherry red dress to see me married.

June+

This is the summer

This is the summer of my mother’s dying.  Several times lately, that statement has come out of my mouth, and every time it has surprised me.  My mother is just a month and a few days shy of 95 years.  Already lost are her husband of 63 years, the eyesight needed by an avid reader, and the mobility to maintain her independence.  In so many ways, this world is not her home anymore.
    I spent last evening going through a trunk of her papers and magazines.  Mother tends to put the valuable in with the useless, tie it all up in a plastic bag and put that with other bags in a box.  I can never assume that the top layer of anything is indicative of what is actually there.  Among the surprising finds last night were two photographs of her that I have never seen before. 
    One is a tiny two-inch square, black and white photo of her taken probably in the ‘30’s before she married my father.  Her skin is smooth, her hair very dark, her eyes wide open and almost black, looking away from the camera.  She looks very serious, but not unhappy – as if she is simply waiting for what comes next but unsure of what it will be. 
    The other is an eight by ten, full color portrait taken just a few years ago for her church directory.  She is looking directly at the camera, her hair still mostly dark, her dark eyes are bright if a little sad, and her skin is wrinkled with her years.  She looks still, receptive, tentative, almost as if she is going to begin speaking.  Her smile is heartbreaking for me.  I have not seen that smile for a long time now.  This is the summer of my mother’s dying, and that smile is dying too.
    I sat and looked at both photos for a long time last night.  Not crying – I am not able to do that yet.  It is hard for me to realize how little I know of her beyond being my mother.  The woman was obscured by the mother and that veil was never lifted for me. I so wanted to ask the tiny photo:  what are you dreaming about?  what do you love to do?  what do you want your life to mean?  are you happy? 
    Actually, I would love to ask the same questions of the older woman in the second photo.  Part of my sadness is that I do not know the answers to these questions even now.  The veil is still in place.
    It helps to know that this world is not a permanent home for any of us.   There is mercy and grace in God’s plan for us as God’s children.  But this is the summer of my mother’s dying, and I understand much better now the phrase from the Psalm:  Yea, thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou are with me.  And with her also.

June+