When dying happens

...Friday, August 2, 2024

When my mom was dying, it was everything I expected, and everything I didn’t. With pancreatic cancer, we’d been told it would change quickly, suddenly, unexpectedly, and so I found myself holding my breath for the seven and a half months it took to course through her body, and still it took me by surprise with its ending.

One day she was sitting and talking and eating and smiling, and the next day she was throwing up, never really getting out of bed again.

Confession: The nurse and I lied to our family, her friends, the morning after this Friday. No one else seemed ready to watch her die. And so my middle brother did what my middle brother does: he threw a party, yes, a party.

It’s a party while my mom is checked out on her phone.

People came: my brother’s friends, our niece, our cousin and her husband, another cousin, my own children, my mom’s great granddaughter. My brother barbecued steak, chicken, shrimp, pork, mushrooms. People ate and ate and ate. I watched my mom sitting first outside in her garden chair, then in her recliner in her tie-dyed purple *bajamas* (as she and I called them). I watched her all night as she stared off into the distance. Everyone else seemed oblivious to her indifference, except my daughter who I think also knew.

My daughter’s eyes tell the real story and so do my mother’s.

Around 9 pm on that Friday, after my mom fell asleep five or six times in her chair, I tried to gently nudge her toward her bedroom. “But this is my house,” she said. Ever the hostess, my mom claimed she couldn’t leave the living room with guests in her home. “It would be rude,” she exclaimed.

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Until you have your first child, you never fully understand the term *mama bear* but something happens when your child is born—someone tries to do something to your infant that you don’t want, and the mama bear in you rises violently, with surety. It doesn’t matter if that someone is a stranger, your partner, another family member, or a doctor. “No, I will not give him three vaccines at once—how then will I know which one, if any, he reacts too?”

“No, I’m not going to let him cry himself to sleep, or lie him down, or let him fall asleep on his own.”

“No.”

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The mama bear in me was activated as soon as my mother was diagnosed, back in January, back when everyone wanted to come visit, when people were still believing there was a cure, when my mother thought she’d beat the odds, with a drug or a miracle, with prayer. I told people not to come visit if they were sick; I created a medication schedule; I started a CaringBridge even when my mother was uncertain of its usefulness; I created a visiting schedule. And at the same time, I tried (though sometimes failed) at assuring my mom that I wanted her to have autonomy through the entire ordeal.

So when the party continued, and when my mother was unwilling to go to bed until the party was over, I stepped into the backyard and declared, “The party is over. My mom needs to go to bed and won’t until everyone leaves.”

As people do at parties, everyone pretended they were leaving anyways. My older brother—always the entertainer and the entertainment—gave me a sideways glance as if to suggest the party was just getting started. Normally I’d bow to his wants as the older sibling, as the man, because growing up in a patriarchal family, the patriarchy still reigned strong in my blood despite all my efforts to squelch the urge to purge myself of its hold on me. On that night, I just stared back and said, “She’s exhausted, and needs to sleep.”

That familiar look of irritation toward me that my brother J has given me so many times. And finally, after decades, I am building my resilience to it.

My mother, just hours before though un-hungry, attempted to eat some steak, some shrimp, some chicken, some pork because well, “I want to taste what your brother barbecued.” The men in my family have always been lifted up onto a pedestal I could never reach. She always wanted to please them while I always tried to please her.

So she ate tiny bites choking it down with water she never wanted to drink. “You force water down me,” my mother claimed often when I tried to fill her glass five or six times a day. “You are trying to drown me,” she say.

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In the beginning, I took it personally. My brother would bring her water, and she’d nod and say thank you. When I’d bring her water she’d say, “look at you being so bossy and ordering me around.” Even though that was our norm my whole life, I couldn’t help but take it personally. Sometimes, her comments sent me to my old bedroom, the one I grew up in, the room where I first tried to kill myself, the room I hid in after I was hit with a belt, the room I climbed out of at night to run away. Sometimes, in those early days as a grown woman in my late 50s, I’d go into my old bedroom and sob myself to sleep again.

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The party was finally over, the guests disbursed, and together my mother and I went into her bedroom to go to sleep. I crawled into her queen sized bed next to her. She asked me to hold her hand while she cried herself to sleep.

That was the last day she ever ate a meal again.

Tomorrow I will lie to my mother for the last time.