Though I enjoy talking about the things that happen in my writing life, I rarely go into details of my private life on this journal or on my message board or anywhere else online. I might mention something in passing, but most of it I figure is of little interest to the world at large, nor is it really anyone else’s business. Similarly, I’ve never been one to announce my comings and goings from message boards. I come, I go, if people notice one way or the other, fine, but if not, fine, too.
However, sometimes things happen in a person’s life that you just need to talk about. Talking is part of coming to terms with this change, and if I had a journal or diary outside of this one, I would probably be writing in there. But I don’t, so you have this.
I haven’t been around much in the past several weeks. Half of the last six weeks I’ve spent in Canada visiting my mother. Two years ago last week, my father passed away after a five year battle with cancer. He and my mother had been married for about 55 years at the time, and in the after math of his death, life simply wasn’t the same for my mother. How could it be? Five-plus decades? It would be akin to losing several major body parts. Being rent down the middle.
The first year seemed to be okay for her. She grieved but she kept going. In the past year, though, she went through a process of divesting herself of responsibilities. She gave up her involvement in the many organizations that she’d been very active in for decades. She didn’t go out of the house as much. Some days she probably didn’t eat very much and others she found little reason even to get out of bed. This set up a feedback process whereby not eating much led to weakness such that some days she probably couldn’t get out of bed even if she wanted to.
She was a very determined person, so it wasn’t until late November that she’d declined to the point where she agreed to be taken to the hospital. We hoped that, under medical supervision, she would bounce back enough to at least get out of the hospital. We thought it unlikely that she’d ever live at home alone again, but perhaps an assisted living home or something, where she could at least interact with others. There were probably medical issues involved as well, but they were undiagnosed, by her choice. Had I magic wand to wave, I don’t know what I would have wished for, because getting her well enough to go home again wouldn’t have been the answer, for that would have just put her back to the starting line of her decline again.
I spent a week with her in November, and another week during Christmas. Each visit, she was smaller, frailer, and weaker. I think she found the solution to the magic wand solution herself. I left on Christmas Day unsure I’d ever see her again. A few days later she was moved to palliative care and last week we knew the end was approaching, though at a rate determined only by my mother’s abundant will to go on. I arrived two days before she died. She could still whisper her wishes and knew we were all there. We stayed with her in the hospital around the clock until she died on Wednesday night. I doubt any of us had more than about four hours sleep over a three-day period.
Thought it was a sad time for us, we reached peace with the process and were ready to let her go before the end came. We would have sped her along to that ending if it had been within our power, but it wasn’t. In the following days, as we made plans and joined with the community to say a final public farewell, we reminisced about many, many happy experiences from our lives with our family, parents and community, and oddly enough we laughed a lot. Our memories were almost uniformly happy, and I wish that everyone could have the same sort of pleasant upbringings that we did. Both of my parents were large figures in their communities, and the turnouts for their funerals were among the most overwhelming parts of the experience. They touched a lot of people.
I had one brief discussion with a neighbor at the post-funeral reception that really touched me. I always called Mom & Dad — and later just Mom — at 2 pm on Sundays. It just got to be a tradition. That was 4 pm where they lived. The neighbor told me how, no matter what was going on, Mom always had to be home at 4 for my call. (Similarly, I always planned my Sundays with that 2 pm timeslot as the pivot point that would not be moved.) That this appointment was important enough that others knew of it pleased me. But then the neighbor said, “You won’t have to do that any more” and I was taken a bit by surprise. It seemed…out of place. What did she mean? She continued, “Now you can talk with her whenever you want” and I was moved to tears…as I am now as I write this. Though I am not a person of faith, and my belief in an afterlife is virtually nil, it was a profoundly moving and touching sentiment.
The part of the process that we haven’t dealt with yet is going through her belongings, a daunting task that we’ve decided to put off for some time. I’ve done this before, with a couple of my wife’s relatives, but then there wasn’t quite the same emotional resonance. I didn’t really know those people. Every little trinket didn’t mean something to me. Just thinking about trying to distribute, dispense or otherwise dispose of an entire houseful of decades of accumulated belongings made me want to come back here and sell everything that I don’t use on a regular basis. Otherwise, our belongings become the burden of the next generation.
If I ever question whether or not I’m really a writer, I think that was answered for me during this process, as I found myself capturing little thoughts and ideas for future use. That sounds cold and calculating, I know, but I couldn’t help doing otherwise. This was another life experience, and we writers do nothing more than mine our lives for the ore of inspiration.
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