Mom

Mom died early on a Monday morning with the blue sky outside her window and a little blue jay-bird pecking at the feeder. Jeanne was holding her hand as she took her last breath.

The last few days had been difficult as we struggled to deal with her pain and anxiety. 

When we first got here, she was surprisingly cognizant of the world around her, far more than we had been led to believe. It's difficult to adequately convey the mindset of an ailing person when you've been dealing with them day after day through a spectrum of ups and downs, highs and lows; you tend to focus on the frustrating moments, the failure moments, the blank-brain episodes when they can't quite remember the words or they can't understand yours; and then you amplify your them in importance as the despair envelops you and you need to make others understand the depth of your feeling. But there were moments when the clouds cleared and normality returned and it was as though there was nothing wrong in the whole world other than the fact that she was still dressed in her nightgown in the middle of the afternoon.

Jeanne and Jan and Dad had been dealing with it for weeks by the time we arrived. In that time, she had lost a lot of ground. Her mobility was nearly gone; she could not walk; she could not stand by herself; her only mode of transport between the bedroom and the bathroom and the dinner table and the back room was the wheelchair. While we were there, she became even more constrained and was confined to her bed. The hospice nurses were now coming every day. In the last couple of days, the hospice nurses were coming every day, and we were administering medications every hour. We were not getting a great deal of sleep. Dad was on the trundle bed in her room; Jeanne and her dog Wendy were in the room across the hall; Cheryl and I were upstairs in Dad's room. Sleep was difficult if not impossible. I lay on the bed with my face glued to the monitor which displayed the night-vision image of my mother as she lay dying, jumping to my feet whenever it appeared that Mom was restless and needing assistance. But my help was superfluous: Dad and Jeanne were right there on the spot and dealing with it. 

We tracked her transitions through the phases of death. Saturday morning was the last time I was able to talk to her with any kind of response. By Saturday afternoon, she had moved onto the self-focused phase where she was unable to communicate in any real sense. Her eyes were mostly closed and she breathed in rasping, rattling sounds which continued all night long. Her medication doses were increased to reduce the apparent pain and discomfort she was experiencing, and she slept more peacefully throughout Sunday, although her breathing was still loud due to some kind of aspiration.

Monday morning around 8 am, we administered a scheduled dose of pain and anxiety medications and then turned her over so that she could breathe more easily. Dad went upstairs to get a shower. Jeanne held her hand. I went into the kitchen to get a drink. And then Jeanne called out that Mom had stopped breathing.

And she had.