How Mom died Part 3 – Regret springs eternal

“Cancer isn’t a boogeyman,” I told Becky. (though I was really trying to tell that to myself.) “I mean, it’s something people live through all the time. It isn’t a death sentence. It’s serious and we need to look it at that way.”

Becky, I think, felt that way, too. We were doing our best to be helpful to Mom, caring and loving and that was what we could do.

After about a week and a half in the hospital, Mom was released. I picked her up in her car, which I’d been driving because mine was in for repairs. Grandma was with me and she was really nervous, edgy and more demanding than usual. I was trying to be calm and she frustrated easily. How mom would know we were there, ready to pick her up was a big concern for Grandma, even though I’d just told her that I had called Mom on the phone and she was on her way down.

It was windy and kind of cold that day. Grandma didn’t think I’d pulled the car close enough to the exit. She was in a wheelchair, so I felt it was all the same. Moving up would have been just another 15 or 20 feet and it was in the no parking zone, though I don’t really care about such minor legal business. I think I just wanted to say, “No, stop. I don’t need any more nagging or instruction from you.” Maybe I should have pulled up anyway. I don’t know.

They’d drained the fluid – six liters – from Mom’s abdomen. She felt better and could eat. I don’t know why that volume of fluid didn’t sound crazy to me at the time, evidence of something awful. I’m can be naive at times. I remember reading that babies spend much of their time in their interior world, in their imagination. Maybe most of their time. I kind of do that, too.

On the ride home we stopped at Burger King – Mom’s request and a hell of a bad choice as end of life meals go if you ask me – and picked up chicken sandwiches. That was the last time I’d eat with Mom. It’s funny how all these first and last times seem to take on some significance and importance that they’ve never really earned. Perhaps dramatists would be better off doing more flashbacks to scenes that really mean something, where something striking was learned or exchanged between the characters. Yet, as I sit here, your narrator, describing this and wanting to tell you of almost any meal other than this one, this last one, in a car with my Mom, the past is occluded nearly as well as the future. I feel that I’ve got to tell this before I tell the rest.

Anyway, not much happened. Basically, I dropped them off at her Mom’s house. I think I put in a new faucet for Mom while I was there. It was one among many projects around her house that I’d meant to work on for her but hadn’t gotten around to doing. A new phrase sprung to mind while she lay dying – that’s just more than a week away from where we are now in the story – “Regret springs eternal.”

Mom’s condition seemed to go downhill quickly. It was a day later that I witnessed her giving up her dogs to my Dad. It was quick. “I’ve got to say goodbye to my babies,” she said. It was a quick pat on the head and they were out the door.

She ordered all the gear she thought she needed to see this through and was prepared to battle the cancer. A hospital bed in the living room, a lift chair and a frame support for the toilet came that week. The back steps were measured for a ramp. This wasn’t all at once. Each modification to her home was in response to something that had happened.

One day she found she couldn’t stand up after sitting on the toilet. Grandma wasn’t strong enough to help her and two men from Mom’s church had to come in and lift her, using towels under her arms as supports. “Stephen, I’ve been completely humiliated today,” Mom said of this.

The makeshift, plywood ramp and the measurements for the proper ramp that would have been installed came because Mom couldn’t climb the back steps. She had assistance – people came over and actually lifted her legs with her so that she could get in the back door.

I visited several times that week, but the house was always busy with someone doing something new – it felt like a hospital, with caretakers and machines - or Mom was uncomfortable and exhausted. Visits were short. She could only take a few minutes she said, to talk with me. There was just so much that had to be done. She was digging in.

Grandma was driven and slept little. Mary, my Mom’s friend of more than fifty years, stayed overnight one evening to try and give Grandma a break. She didn’t want it. Grandma and I argued on at least one occasion that week in front of Mom, who pleaded with us to stop. She just couldn’t take it.

Mary Ellen stopped by with me on the night Mary was over. We had come with Mary Ellen’s boyfriend Ben to pick up a bookcase. Mom wanted unused furniture out of her house. It felt really important to her to get rid of it and Mary Ellen needed a bookcase, so there we were. They talked that night. I don’t know what about – probably just how Mom was doing – and I remember how compassionate Mary E. looked standing next to Mom’s hospital bed. I thought that, under better circumstances, they might have become friends.

“I don’t know, Steve,” Mary Ellen said on the way back. “Your Mom looks pretty rough.” Cancer, she advised, and chemotherapy takes a heavy toll on even young, healthy people. She wasn’t optimistic. It had been more than two weeks, maybe three, since Mom had even been able to shower.

“Is my Mom dying?” I asked Becky. “Surely not. That’s not what’s happening, is it?”

Neither of us knew.

Mom was back in the hospital on that Saturday. It was March 17, three days before she died. She’d fallen and couldn’t get up like in that terrible cliché line from that stupid commercial. Actually, she’d slumped. Mary described it to me this way: Mom was coming back from a doctor’s visit – one that seemed really unnecessary, as in they should have come to her – and she was trying to get up the back steps. She was able to lift one leg up one step and then she couldn’t go anymore. All she could do was stand there, supporting herself on the railing.

Grandma tried to help her and she couldn’t. She went and got something – a shawl or blanket to cover Mom – it was windy and still cold and then Mom’s legs just gave out. She slumped down and back and lay there, helpless. The toll of the cancer had reached a crescendo. She called 911 – she’d done so just a couple of days before for help with the same steps – this time she had them take her to the emergency room.

I visited with her that Saturday night. I brought my ipod to show her pictures of Uly and Jaesyn. She told me that she had sinned against her body and this was the result. This was her time in Purgatory. I told her I didn’t think dwelling on negativity was at all constructive. We felt differently about it.

I told her stories to make her laugh. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen to Grandma,” I said to Mom.

“Oh, Stephen, I am too,” she winced.

“It’s okay, though,” I said. Then I named a person neither of them could stand and said, “In have it all set, she’s going to move in with Grandma. “

“Oh, Stephen! Don’t you bring that woman in her house!”

And she laughed when I told her it was a joke. I got another smile out of her when I teased that an overly chatty friend would be staying the night with her.

It was after 11 p.m. and Mom noted the time, saying, “Stephen, go home. Becky and the baby need you.”

And that was the last visit we had together. It’s so thin, so paper thin. Not at all the feast a last memory should be.