Where to begin. The folly of not blogging for long periods of time is that then there is just so MUCH. And so I find myself this morning wondering how much, and which tidbits. But to be an honest blogger is to commit to documenting them all, in some fashion. So I shall.
I committed to making the holidays 2011 the BEST EVER...again...for my mother. She was doing so well, seemed to be plugging along like the trooper she was, and so I told her "You know Lucy, I busted my ass last year to make it the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER since it was supposed to be your last one. That's just too much pressure to try and out-do. You get what you get this year." It was designed to make her laugh, and it did. I of course worked like a fool to make sure all the decorations were just perfect. And she did have a wonderful Thanksgiving and Christmas, she was happy. New Years came and I had thrown Malcolm an all night birthday party on the 30th. On New Years Eve I was exhausted and fell asleep by 9 pm. I had promised Lucy I wouldn't go out that night because she'd told me she wasn't feeling well, and I wanted to be around the house. My daughter celebrated the New Year with my mom, as I was passed out cold and my Pet had attended a party just a short ways away. New Year's Day came, and things seemed fine, my mom was feeling better, and we were making plans for what we'd accomplish in 2012.
New Year's day was a great day with Lucy. I began taking our tree down since it had lost every bit of moisture, and was dropping needles at an alarming rate. I got all the balls off, and the angel put away. I'd had enough though, and called it a night. We'd had spaghetti dinners from Sam's, and that always gave me heartburn. It was one of Lucy's favorite meals though, and it seemed an appropriate salute to a new year. We all went to bed, and I was awakened at 3 am by Lucy banging her cane on the floor. I jumped up, aware that she did that when she was in distress. I put something on and went down to see if she'd had diarrhea again, knowing that was a chronic condition and that eating spaghetti can trigger it. When i got to her room, she was sitting on the side of her bed unable to breathe. She was in respiratory failure.
As a Congestive Heart Failure patient in tertiary stages, respiratory failure is an indication that some kind of cardiac event has occurred. Little did I know at the time, Lucy had been having intermittent chest pains for days and had never discussed them with me because she didn't want to worry me. Because of where she was in the stage of her disease, she wasn't supposed to be going to the hospital any more. We were supposed to be dealing with it at home, and making her comfortable. I looked at her and said "Jesus Lucy, you made it all the way through the Holidays just to give it up on the 2nd day of the new year? Really?" She kind of chuckled, and said, "I know, right?" I told her that if her choice was not to go to the hospital, that there was every indication that I could not get her out of the failure, that this one would be the last one. She looked at me knowingly and said "I'm not getting out of this one." I sat on the floor of her room then, feeling utter defeat, and not really wanting to accept what was coming up now.
We stayed at home for about 16 hours, she laboring to breathe, me administering morphine to make her comfortable because it was all I had. Finally after seeing the stress it was causing my daughter, and realizing that I really couldn't make her more comfortable, she agreed to go to ER, and did so with Hospice's blessing. She went, and seemed to rebound then. The ER techs administered a neb treatment, which rather infuriated me because had I known about it, I could have done that too. I have a million of them as i am an asthma patient. Knowing I could have made her comfortable 16 hours previous was an irritant. They also found she was dehydrated, so they pumped a bag or two of fluid into her. She wanted to go home, but I was worried that the added fluids would put her back into respiratory failure as soon as we got home, so I convinced her to stay overnight for observation. Her breathing was good and bad by turns that night, unknown to me when I went home at 4 am. I went back to the hospital in the afternoon then, met with the doctors and nurses who were diagnosing the beginning of the dying process, and indeed weren't sure she would make it through the night. I stayed at the hospital that night and she rebounded again, the woman of a thousand miracle recoveries.
We decided to have her placed in Hospice House. It was apparent she was now bed-ridden and needed more care than I could administer at home alone. She also didn't want to go home, didn't want to burden me with that level of care. I assured her I would do it if that was what she wanted. I'd applied for FMLA, and was prepared to do it. I felt abject relief not to have to though, and I'm not afraid to admit that. I'm so thankful that my daughter didn't have to watch it all in the close confines of her home. The rest of the story is not really for writing down. The slow steady decline of her body, my mental fight with the concept of Comfort Care and it's close similarity to Euthanasia, and more than 2 weeks of watching her struggle. But also watching my brothers and sisters and I come closer together by degrees, leaving old grievances behind, and moving forward as a unit to take care of the woman we all loved in our own way.
It became apparent after the first week and a half of watching Lucy hold on that somehow she was waiting for something. My oldest brother said it first.....maybe she's waiting for dad...he died on the 18th you know. I had my doubts at first that she'd last that long, it seemed impossible that someone could labor to breathe for that length of time. But the date fast approached. The eve of the 17th, I knew it was time. I went to her, brought Christmas lights, brought an alpha/beta wave CD, and stayed the night doing vigil. That morning, I just knew. I had the CNA that came in to wash her also groom her and make her beautiful. They washed her hair, sculpted her eyebrows, removed her facial hair, and washed her body. They put on her favorite color. I'd told her repeatedly it was ok to go, that we would be fine...that she didn't have to worry and that if she wanted to continue to help my daughter and I, she'd have to pass on and help us from the other side. I gave her permission to go. Then I sent up a thought to my father "You bastard, you better not be late".
My father was killed on Jan 18th, 1979 at 8:30. At 9:45 on Jan 18th, 2012, after they'd finished washing and dressing her, my mother also left the earth. Thirty three years to the day, and almost within an hour of my dad's passing....the nursing staff was incredibly creeped out. I cried, I hoped to God I did right by her, and I called my siblings. They came, as they could, and we sat with her a bit, to say goodbye...to figure out what to do, to just....think. It had been so much for so long, and suddenly it was just over.
We planned her funeral to her specifications. She'd been remarkably frank about what she wanted, and she and I had gone over virtually every detail. If I can recommend one document to everyone I know that will make your life, and your death better, it's the Five Wishes document (http://www.agingwithdignity.org/). Take it from me, people do fucked up shit when their loved ones die, and if you have a vision that you want followed....WRITE IT DOWN!!!! And tell someone that you trust to do it. She didn't want a wake, she thought those were creepy, being on display for everyone to gawk at. So we just had a beautiful funeral mass for her at Holy Cross Church, followed by an open house back at our house, finally opening it back up for friends and neighbors to visit...like the did way back in the old days.
Both my real family, and my swinger family helped me get through this time. With cleaning, catering, everything. I love you all for all the help both physical and financial. THANK YOU. So yes, everyone was there for me, sort of, except for one glaring missing person. Satan.
There are a thousand reasons, excuses, and explanations I suppose. But the end result was that he was not there for me on the one day that I needed him above all others. And even more interesting, he knew he wouldn't be. He knew, and he felt badly enough to make sure that Jachin, after a year of not being in my life, would be there for me. So, he called in a backup? I'd told him that if he didn't show up, to not bother calling me again. I was done. And I knew from his mother that the one thing that Satan couldn't stand more than anything else on the planet was....silence.
Silence I gave him, for months. I was moving on without him, my life tumbling faster than I could manage it, in ways I wasn't sure I was ready to handle. I went to parties without him, knowing that every move I made, every man I touched was being reported back to him by someone, somewhere. So I made every party count, and I became a dirty whore in truth, fucking men by the truckload with no other need than to feed a growing beast inside me that couldn't be sated. And as I knew people were telling him my escapades, so were people attempting at every turn to report back to me about his equally voracious appetites.
Valentines came and went, and I passed it feeling angry, and unsatisfied. My inner beast, Lilith, was thrashing about inside of me screaming for release, yet she was trapped. Satan called me one morning at 5 am, knowing I was still programmed to answer any early phone call as something akin to an emergency. To answer without looking at the caller. He knew how to play dirty, and he slid in under my defenses. It was ugly, it was accusatory. How could I love him, but just shut him out? How could he abandon me when I needed him most? How could I create a family of the people we cared for most, then close the door in his face. How could he always place other people above me and think I'd always be ok with it? And then the question from both of us...."Why did you leave me?"
In March, I went to visit his mother. I'd missed her fiercely, and looked forward to taking her shopping, and maybe out to dinner as well. I got to her nursing home, and she was......gone.
Gone.
The nursing home staff could only tell me that he'd removed her just the weekend before but couldn't tell me anything else. In a panic, I called him at work, hyperventilating and sobbing. "WHERE IS SHE???" He was so disdainful.
"I moved her to Boston".
"You didn't tell me! I didn't even get to say goodbye!"
"People who throw giant tantrums and refuse to answer their phones don't get to find out about shit."
I had to hang up then, unable to even speak for the sobs that were coming up my throat. I'd lost it all at that moment. I'd lost my mother, I'd lost the man I loved more than life, and I'd lost his mother too. I had nobody left that knew my soul. Even now, thinking back to that very dark time brings the tears again.
I'll have to continue in a part two.
