January 16, 2013

• The Mom Post

  Recently a very sweet Xangan lost her father suddenly and as you might expect, she is struggling through the grieving process. It reminded me of when I lost my mother some 13 years ago. In all my years here on Xanga, I don’t think I have posted much about my mom and her death. I’m going to attempt to do this in one post, however it might take more than one to fully tell the story.

  My dad died when I was four leaving my mom to raise us from that point on. Being that I took after my mom in that I was stubborn and sometimes childish, as you would expect, I had a difficult relationship with my mother to say the least. I know a lot of people have trouble getting along with their parents, but for me it might have been that much more of a challenge simply because of the age gap between us. My mom was 41 years old when she gave birth to my twin brother and I, so naturally this was more than just your typical parental-child generation gap; shit she was old enough to be my grandmother. As I became a teenager and young adult, my relationship with my mom grew difficult and contentious to say the least. Some of this was my fault, some of it was her fault; either way it was not a good situation in the least. While I can certainly go on and on about the various arguments and disagreements we had throughout the years, that is not what this post is about.

  In August of 1999, my mom started experiencing some pain in the back part of her leg. My mom did not have health insurance so she never went to the doctor not even for any sort of routine care. But, eventually the pain grew so bad that she went and in September of that year she was diagnosed with cancer. While the pain in her leg was from cancer in her bone, the doctors had determined that it had started in her kidney and had already spread to her leg and lymph nodes. This meant that she was already two strikes down. I still remember vividly when she was diagnosed. I was working second shift at the time so the task of driving her to the hospital for a bone biopsy fell on me. The procedure was a surgical one and consisted of her having to be put under. After the surgery she was still out of it in the recovery room while I talked with the doctor. I asked him flat out  if it was cancer. He said it was. I was stunned. I left the room and wandered aimlessly around the hospital. It was the loneliest moment of my life. My mom was always a tough and strong woman who had gone through hell in her life. On the way home my mom nervously asked me if the doctor said it was cancer. I froze for a brief second and tried to summon up the courage to tell her the truth but all that came out of my mouth was “I don’t know.” It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.

  That night I went to my best friend J.T.’s house. He had known that I was taking my mom for the procedure. As he sat on a chair watching an old Seinfeld rerun, I walked in and instantly started sobbing, and instantly hugging him for support. I knew then that I would be able to count on him as my rock that I could lean on for support over the course of the coming months. It is fair to say that without him, I would have had a terrible time making it through what remains as one of the worst times of my life. I can say the same thing about my cousin and one of my mom’s best friends. Without their support, this awful situation would have been made much much worse.

  The months that followed found me taking my mom for her treatments several times a week and trying to take care of her at home, sharing the responsibility with three of my other siblings. Being that I worked second shift, I was the one who took care of her in the later evenings. Her treatments left her weak and sick, often times throwing up and running a fever. I recall one time when I was online surfing the internet while my mom was in the other room watching tv. I heard her choking and calling out for help and I went in the room to try to help her but all she kept doing was coughing and asking for me to help her. The look of fear was in her eyes which was a very hard thing for me to see. It was at that moment that I felt completely and utterly helpless. I had no idea how to help her and what was even worse was that for the most part, she was beyond help. What a horrible feeling to have; to look in the eyes of the strongest person you knew and only see the overwhelming fear of the unknown and realize that there is not a damn thing you could do to help her.

  In October of 1999 two of my mom’s friends took her to one of her doctor visits. That afternoon, one of them called me over to their house and sat me down and told them the sobering truth: the doctor said at best, she only had 6-9 months to live. My mom did not know as they asked the doctor this while she was not in the room. I shared this news with a couple of my friends but almost felt a sense of relief that there was an end in sight to the horrible suffering she was having. In November of that year my mom tearfully asked the doctor to put her in the hospital saying that all she wanted was to get better. As  mentioned my mom was a tough and gruff lady. She did not openly show us a lot of love. The only time I can recall my mom telling me she loved me when I was a kid was when I went in for surgery to have a cyst removed when I was nine. So one day I was visiting her in the hospital and I was getting ready to leave. I told her I would see her later and as I was leaving the room she stopped me and said “Michael, I love you.” I was taken aback a first but responded that I loved her too. I walked out of the room towards the elevator, nearly in tears. After that, every time we saw her we told her we loved her before we left.

  The day before Thanksgiving, the doctor summoned my siblings and I to the hospital to tell us the grim news: there was nothing else that he could do for her. This hit my brothers very hard; for me though again it was more relief than anything else. I think because I kept getting the news sooner than them, I was kind of ahead of them in the whole grieving process. Also my twin brother and I had a falling out and had not spoken to each other in three years. That day we got home and my older brother told us that we needed to reconcile for mom’s sake. That was all he needed to say. We both agreed enough was enough and moved on. There was no hug, no I’m sorry, no emotional breakdown. Just a brief “okay it’s over” and that was it. Funny, huh.

  The day after Thanksgiving my mom came home from the hospital to live out her life. She was going to have a hospice nurse come in and check on her every day but of course, we all still lived at the house. The nurse told us that she would be there just to make mom comfortable until she died and that we very well might wake up one day to find her dead. This of course, made us all feel uneasy. That night though, she took a turn for the worse. Her breathing labored heavily and we did not quite know what to do. So we called the ambulance and my mom left her home for the last time. We now started what can only be described as a death watch for the next week. The doctor said she could go at anytime so we should get as many people there as possible. So we summoned our sister from Denver to come see her for the last time.

  The nights and days at the hospital seemed endless. We were determined for her not to be alone when she died. While I had been strong to that point, I could not bear to be in the hospital room with my mom as she laid there, struggling to breath as she slowly died a painful death. I would walk in the room, see her for a few minutes and leave. I told my siblings that they would need to be the ones to be in there with her; I simply could not handle it but I would be there for them when she finally passed. I remember saying that I could not wait for the whole thing to be over; that in a year things would be so much easier. I also recall being so stressed that I was losing weight, in spite of the fact that I was not exercising or dieting at all. People kept asking me what I was doing to lose weight and I told them that I was on a stress diet; sure the stress would take years of my life but at least I would leave behind a thin corpse! We also had a wonderful group of amazing friends who stood by us through the whole thing. Many of them stood at the hospital with us all night, sleeping in the waiting room with us or in the room with my mom. Hell, a couple of times we would show up to the hospital and they would already be there, waiting in the waiting room for us. While some of my mom’s family was wonderful, others were heartless and mean; some of my mom’s siblings took the worst time of our life and managed to make it worse.

  After about a week, my mom managed to pull through and she was eventually transferred to a nursing home in December of 1999. Each day I would stop by the nursing home to see her before I went to work. On December 30, 1999 I stopped by to find that my mom was in a rather frazzled state and was not doing well. That night she was transferred back to the hospital. I know this sounds weird,  but every year my brothers and I threw a New Year’s Eve party at our house. We were determined for life to go on and this year our good friend Dave was planning on proposing to his girlfriend at the stroke of midnight on NYE. So we still had our party, although it was a little bit more subdued and I remember not getting drunk at all because I was worried about having to be called to the hospital at any moment.

  The next day we went to see mom in the hospital. Of of our lives, my mom dressed my twin brother Mark and I alike or bought us the same clothes. We hated it and always tried our best to not dress alike. But, that day I showed up at the hospital to find that Mark was wearing the same shirt as me. Although we had not planned it, the last time we saw our mom alive we were wearing the same shirt. The next day, January 2, 2000 we got a call from the hospital about 11:30 in the morning. They told us to rush to the hospital as the end was near. I drove my sister and I in my mom’s mini van. Now keep in mind, I was used to driving a tiny Chevette and not a mini van, so parking it was not easy for me. As I struggled to park the van in the parking garage at about 12:12 pm, upstairs in her hospital room with one of her older brothers by her side, my mom took her last breath.

  Next post, the year after she died.

  • 10:15 pm
  • 2 Comments