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Dying in your home sounds better than it actually is, at least that was true for my mother. On an April spring day, it was deadly quiet, even though the bugs were making their high pitch sounds, it was still so very quiet. I looked at my mother, laying in the dining room on a hospital bed and thought that this was not how she wanted it to end. Most of us imagine that we are surrounded by the ones we love, holding our hands, flowers filling the room, people stopping by with food of all kinds and to offer their love.
But it wasn’t that way at all. It was quiet. My stepfather would walk by the dining room, barely glancing in her direction on his way to another room, unable to even truly look at her. My brother would come in for a few minutes and awkwardly pat her hand and then leave just as quickly as he got there.
She didn’t look like herself. With the morphine drip, she wasn’t even conscious. This once powerful and intimidating woman was reduced to a shriveled version of a herself, lying like a mummy on the bed. Her once beautiful high cheekbones made her face and head look like a skull. Her fingers were still graceful and her wrists were as impossibly small as ever. But they somehow seem disconnected to the rest of her body that was disseminated by the chemotherapy. I’m not sure what ultimately killed her – the chemotherapy or the two cancers the drugs were supposed to eliminate.
Not many people stopped by during the last few days of her life. A good friend dropped off soup as she had been doing for the past year. My stepfather made lots of calls out in the backyard, sounding quite chipper as he did so. Everyone grieves differently but it irritated me to hear him sound so sociable. My brother mostly read. It was his way of coping, but I wanted company as I sat by my mother’s bed. It was lonely.
I wondered if my mother was lonely, if she knew that it was only me that was beside. And perhaps my crying at times was difficult for her to bear. It took me a day or two to pull myself together, sitting by her bedside, and to give her the “it’s okay to let go … we’ll be okay” speech. Not that I believed it.
It was Tuesday morning when I told her that I would be right back after taking a quick shower. Not more than 10 minutes later, I found her dead in the dining room on the rented hospital bed. At first I felt I had failed her, that I had chosen to leave just when she needed me the most. But my mother was a very private person, and in hindsight, I wouldn’t be surprised if she waited for me to leave to die her own personal death. Or maybe I believe that as to comfort myself.
I tried closing her eyelids so my stepfather and brother wouldn’t be traumatized by seeing her lifeless eyes staring out at nothing. But they wouldn’t shut. It took me many times to just get them down halfway. I don’t know how long I was with her before I finally went to tell them that she had died. I wanted her all to myself for the last time. She had donated her body to science so there wouldn’t be a grave or an urn to have nearby. Only my memories to keep me company.
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