My Mother's Last Days!

Mom was having lots of troubles with cardiac failure, and probably kidney failure as well, but seemed determined to keep on trucking. She was so proud when she made it all the way to the mailbox about a block from her apt. But she had trouble getting back. It was hard to tell what was the trouble, and I am not sure if it wasn't everything and COPD. But she kept doing OK, and when the assisted living place said we might start looking for something that could care for Mom with more intensity, we had no idea that it would soon be a traumatic trip to the hospital. We were called by the hospital, and I called my brother and we all started to drive North. We were 40 miles from the hospital, and my brother was 80 miles. We drove a road along the water and as we neared the town where the hospital was, Ode To The Moon came on the radio, there was an electrical storm going on all around us, and it was 12:00 midnight. What a spectacular way for someone to leave this world.

We arrived at the hospital, and were ushered into the Intensive Care Wing, and my brother soon arrived with his wife. Mom was hooked up to too many tubes, and was not breathing on her own, but they said she could hear us if we wanted to talk to her. It was hard to see and comprehend that this was the wonderful happy little Mom we all knew. But we talked to her and told her to keep up the fight and we would be there for her. They told us not to expect her to last the night. We left somewhere around 4:00 AM, and went home to be called and told that Mom had made it and would be making it for awhile maybe.

She actually went back to her apt. and when it next happened, maybe a month later, when we got to her apt. we found a note that she had written to us saying goodbye. We were in the apt. getting her glasses and some clothes as they said she could move to a nursing home in a few days. This was the downhill run, and she was very angry for awhile as she had wanted to die, but a neighbor had found her and called 911. She had wanted to let God take her, she said. She was ready, and hadn't she told us so in the note? She made it another few months, and we found her a really nice place near where she had lived for some time, a nursing home that had a day care, and a cat wandering around, and nice places to sit, and she had her own room eventually. When she was really going down hill she did not really understand where she was, and thought it so nice that she was able to live in this nice house with all these nice people. My brother from back East was here for the duration, and he would get to her bedside first in the day and was there when she breathed her last. She did not know much by then and suffered the extreme kidney failure symptoms calmed by morphine, and she slipped away. We got there 30 minutes late, but I held her and said goodbye anyway. She was my little Mom, and she loved us all so much, her kids, her grandkids, and her life, and her God she had found. She left a wonderful legacy of laughter, caring, and love that we all try to emulate in our own way. May she be able to see what she has wrought and be rejoicing in her heaven! Amen