Last year, Mother’s Day was about my Mother. We didn’t know if Mama would be here for Mother’s Day this year, so we made the day especially for her. She was OK with it for a few minutes, but spent a lot of the day not knowing who people were. While she was able to know us, we took pictures, of which I am so proud and thank God for the opportunity to have taken them. She wore a sweater with one of her beloved crocheted collars, and it will be an image of her, looking a little like an angel that I will cherish. Mother did not make it until this year, but I was prepared for that.
I don’t have explainable emotions about her being gone. I stayed in such turmoil those last two years of her life; I sometimes just don’t want to feel anything now. Yet, I wouldn’t call what I don’t feel denial, or avoidance. It is almost a kind of peace. Yet is not, because I still awaken from sleep realizing that my mind is still trying to figure out if there was something else I could have done to keep her from dying. My awake mind realizes it was her time. But I have to tell myself, that if I had hung in there and kept her at home that last little bit, she still would have died. Some days she had seemed so vital, that I believed she was doing better. But there were medical people who just kept warning me. I don’t know why I wanted her to not die. She wanted more than anything to be with her Mother and Daddy. And her “loved ones”, she would say. “I am your loved one,” I would tell her. By the look on her face I would then realize, she was in her childhood memories of her Mother and Daddy, and I didn’t exist then. She couldn’t place me, and she was afraid and confused by that. So I just changed the subject. It is difficult not having your Mother be able to love you anymore. It is something I pray my children will not have to live through with me someday. In fact, I am hoping that keeping my mind active by blogging, will help. If not, I am hoping that I can make a record for my children of who I am, and how I think, and how very much I loved them for as long as I was able.
So this year, I was glad that Mother’s Day was not about my mother, and not even about me being a mother. It was about my daughter being a mother of a new baby, for the third time. We both had two boys and a girl. In a different order, and her little girl was called to live in heaven just before her birth. My daughter had gone through all the elements of shock and grief this would naturally cause, and had begun to heal. Yet she and her husband of the time divorced, she had since gotten an apartment, and found her strength, met a very loving man and remarried. And she was excited to try again to have a child. This year her oldest son is in high school, and her newborn was 7 months old on Mother’s Day. 7 months…that is how long it had been since we buried my Mother. I am able to remember that because the baby was born the very next morning after Mother’s funeral. On the surface it may seem to someone like a sad thing to remember. It was scary when it was happening. Mother died a few days prior to my daughter being induced. Since, my daughter’s previous child had been healthy right up to her sudden passing, I promised to be there at the birth no matter what. In every scenario I could think of, someone could watch Mama. I had even envisioned Mama going to the hospital while we waited for the baby to be born. I had prayed, please let Mama live to see the baby, and please don’t ask me to choose whether I be by my mother when she’s dying or be with my daughter when this child is near birth. Yet, I actually did have to make that decision - before it became a last minute one.
About a month before Mother passed, the head nurse wanted to speak to me in her office. She wanted to know if they should bring in Hospice. After a lot of quandaries about whom it would benefit, I was told it was mostly for the family. I just didn’t need another set of strangers trying to help me get my mind around what was happening. We discussed my daughter’s situation, and I had to choose. The nursing staff assured me they could meet mother’s medical needs, and each time I visited, she was able to do less and less. I did battle with myself as I watched her, one day, able to get up, into her wheelchair and go from window to door trying to find how to get out. I wanted so badly to put her in the car and go for a ride. As always, she wanted to go back to her home. My heart ached for her, because she never forgot about having a home. Thing was, she didn’t remember it when I showed her pictures of it, and while she stayed with me, she thought my house was her home. Some days when she knew me, she was angry because I didn’t carry her home. I would explain but she never accepted the explanation, nor did she remember it. But, in the nursing home, she knew she wasn’t home, and she wanted to go home. On one day when she was active, she told me all about home. She didn’t know me, but she was describing home in great detail. I just nodded as she told about a place in the mountains where she lived as a small child. That was definitely not a home I could have carried her to even if I had tried. She insisted that someone would be waiting for her there. Someone who visited elderly patients often, from a church, once told me, “Always say: maybe you will feel up to it tomorrow and I can take you then.” Yet after she left, I saw the person she had visited stress all day about getting packed and calling her son to come get her. And the next day watched her live through the hours of fear that she was not getting to go home. Alzheimers is a strange disease. And the brain a strange thing. It is as much a roller coaster for them as for us. A month before they thought Mom was dying, and she didn’t. A month later, she had found strength to get up and appeared to be fighting to get well enough to hold the baby when it came.
The days came that I would go into her room and she would be lying there so still. When I touched her she was so cold that I actually thought she had passed. I would call staff, and rub her arms and legs and after a great deal of calling her name into her ear she would come around. She usually recognized me for a while, and we had a very short conversation about something semi-normal, before she began the ritual conversation. She wanted to get up and go to the bathroom. By this time she couldn’t, and there was nothing in the world that I could say to help her understand what a catheter was, or that she hadn’t drunk enough water to be able to go. No, I don’t miss my mother being here, going through that. I don’t miss going into her room every time and thinking she was already gone. What I miss is the mother I used to know, who hasn’t been here for years.
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I am a person who has tremendous difficulties remembering dates. I am not a time-oriented person. My husband checks his watch regularly, knows exactly what he has to do for the day upon awakening. He is the romantic who always remembers our special days. I am the opposite of that. So I jokingly say that on the day they have to take me to the hospital, and the first thing they start asking me is, “What day is it,” please have them ask me some other question to know if I am mentally competent or not. I will not be able to tell them the date or day, and I may not know the year. Which brings me back to my referencing my mother’s death being so close to the baby’s birth. My daughter insisted I go on to be out of town for mother’s funeral. She promised that if anything happened someone would fly me home. I could scarcely breath I was so tormented over going away and leaving her. I had not been with mother when she died; heaven forbid that I not be there if either Heather or the baby should be in jeopardy for a moment of the unthinkable. Thankfully, God did not make me decide between being with mother or with my daughter. And God took mother so quickly I couldn’t have been by her side without being there round the clock.
Staff said that, on that morning, Mom was awake. They had her up and dressed her, and left. When they returned with her medicines, she was gone. The nurse told me, that a month earlier they were thinking she was about to die at any time. But after she had gotten better and was getting up many mornings, this was a shock. They hadn’t anticipated a need to call me now. This was the last day they expected her to die. God did not make me chose. Still, I had to do something that was very difficult. I had to make up my mind to simply trust God at all costs, and leave my daughter in God’s hands while I left town to bury Mom.
I am sure that seems like a “well duh” moment for most people. But when you say, “I am trusting God,” are you just saying it because you know you should, or have you had to actually decide to trust? “Lord, I am so afraid of what might happen in the next few days, that I don’t think I can bear having regrets about it. The only way I can bear this fear is to decide to say, Thy will be done, and trust you to not make me bear the cross of what I fear becoming reality.” The thing that was tearing me up the most was I felt like I was deserting my daughter, who was facing her own fears of the very same thing!! And I had promised I would be there no matter what! In that moment, I felt like I could relate to Jesus when he said, in the Garden of Gethsemane, “if it could be thy will, let this cup pass from me…but whatever - thy will be done” (paraphrased). Jesus did not escape his dreaded day. I wondered how far God would ask me to go into my deepest fears.
I began to turn my thoughts to what I believed the Lord would have me think about:
- I could believe that God wanted this child to live.
- God had led my daughter, her husband and the doctors to decide to deliver the baby by inducing it, so there would be no strain of wondering about the baby’s safety as they neared his natural birth date. I just couldn’t believe that God had any plan other than that this child should live.
- Even if we had to drive all night after the funeral, we could be there for the birth in the morning. If something happened unexpectedly, I had their promise to get me home fast.
- My daughter had a new support system. Prayer warriors themselves.
- And I believed that I truly had reached the limit of what I could bear, and God surely knew that.
- Therefore, I could have faith as a grain of mustard seed, and God said that was all it took to move mountains, so I asked the Lord to help me move this mountain of fear. And he did. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 17:6)
Even though my daughter and the baby did have a bit of a rough time of it, next day, I was there. And my faith was bolstered to help me make it through whatever happened. So on Mother’s Day this year, I quietly celebrated in my heart that I was in a place far from all that fear, and pain, anxiety, and trauma. And next Mother’s Day, I will know that it has been 1 yr and 7 months since my mother passed into heaven. When the baby’s birthday rolls around, I won’t be all sad that it is also when my mother died. I will be glad that this is when my Mother met Jesus face to face, when God brought me through one of my greatest fears on just the tiniest inkling of faith, and my new sweet grandson was born, all in one week.
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Excerpts from Isaiah 61: 1-3 (KJV):
Isaiah said: Vs1.The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me…
he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted. Vs 2 …to comfort all that mourn.
Vs 3…to give unto them beauty for ashes,
the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise
for the spirit of heaviness.
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