Goodbye Mom…

When you marry someone, you just have to hope that they get along okay with your people, and you make an effort to get along with theirs. George wasn’t big on large family gatherings, preferring to spend his off time quietly, at his own house, doing his own thing. My family is loud and boisterous. We’re long winded. Sometimes when you leave our house your ears are ringing. 

George, an only child, got used to us and I think he enjoyed us after a while. He was funny at family gatherings, enjoyed being cooked for, and got better and better at joining in and holding his own. I’ve always thought his favorite family member was my mom. They got along. He thought she was pretty. She thought he was cute. They talked a lot. He respected her and he often brought her opinions up to me and told me why he agreed. He liked her spunk. 

So he would be sad to know that she died the Wednesday before Christmas. 

My mom smoked from when she was 14 until her mid 40s. She was always a bit ashamed of the fact, especially since her later life included being a yoga teacher and she promoted good health habits in that role. 81 when she died, she had pretty much decided she was going to get away with being a smoker. But it turned out that she didn’t. After going to the hospital for an unrelated complaint on November 14 where the doctor threw in a back x-ray because she complained that her hip replacement was hurting, we found out she had stage 4 lung cancer that had metastasized to the spine. They gave us hope for life-extending treatments, but the cancer turned out to be “explosive,” and she became non-responsive at our home one night. They diagnosed pneumonia and aspiration, but it turned out that it was simply that the cancer moved so quickly she was overwhelmed.

They recommended we take her off of the respirator as there was nothing they could do for her. We waited a couple of days, hoping for some kind of miracle, and then accepted the situation. We took Lily over to the hospital where she was allowed into the ICU to say goodbye. Mom was in a coma. Lily laid her head on her shoulder and said, “Goodbye, Grandma. I love you.” It incredibly sad and touching. Dad and Nancy were next. We took them down to the lobby, and then my sister Laura and I went back and waited until the respirator was removed. We sat with her. It was only a minute or two before the doctor came in and said that she had passed on. Very different than the nearly two hour ordeal of George’s death. I felt exhausted, angry, sad, cheated and very lonely. We all got in the car and went home together. It seemed impossible, but my mom’s life was over.

While she was sick I “slept” in the room with her for a couple of weeks. I didn’t sleep much, of course because of the noise from the oxygen, her frequent requests for help, and worry. But we talked a lot. She said one night, “Well, if I don’t get through this, at least we’ll be closer than we have ever been.” And we were. Once again I found that seeing someone through the end of their life is painful and difficult, but an astounding privilege as well. 

We talked a lot about George during those weeks. She reminded me of crazy things he did, like how he drank too much the first time he met my parents and sort of acted like an ass… but then apologized sweetly. How she came to the house in Georgia that I rented from him while he was in Florida at school. “A furnished house.” (No heat. The bathtub falling through the floor.) How she “cleaned it up” and threw away his beer collection (100s of beers all round the top of the living room.) “Not the Billy beer!” he cried, when he came back to Atlanta to visit me. (They really had a hard time getting through that one.) How she made his favorite pot roast for him as often as possible, and how he always asked when she would make it again while he was eating it. 

She told me one thing that I never knew. She said that the last time she saw George, as we were getting in our van to go home, he looked up at her and winked and gave her the thumbs up. She thought of it later that week when he got in his accident and many times after. She said that, now that she was sick, she figured he was giving her a sign that they would see each other, somewhere, again.

I hope that’s true. We’re having her cremated. We’ll sprinkle her ashes under her favorite tree, a lilac, planted where my dad can see it from his favorite chair on the porch. I’m keeping a few of her ashes, and I’m thinking I’ll just throw them in the urn with George. I think they’d like to be together, keep each other company, until the rest of us join them. Wherever they are, I hope they’re eating pot roast and cracking each other up. I can’t think of better company to spend eternity with.

Bless them both.