As October steadily approaches, I am once again reminded that the anniversary of Mom's untimely passing will also be approaching. 2025 will mark the seventh anniversary of her death. I say untimely because she was only 67 years old. She went quickly, to the extent that internally deteriorating in four days' time can be considered expedited. She apparently could feel herself dying on a Monday. On Wednesday afternoon, the medical team decided that there was no longer anything that could be done. She had not only lost consciousness, but she had reportedly started to experience that was deemed to have been organ failure. She would be disconnected from the variety of machines that under normal circumstances, would have helped keep her alive and helped her body regain its own strength to function on its own. Instead, these were keeping her artificially alive and in some way, prolonging the inevitable.
It was never specified which organs were shutting down, but it would not have mattered in the slightest if we had had this information readily available to us. Heart. Kidneys. Lungs. Bladder. All of it, irrelevant in the end. She would die in the early morning hours the following Thursday. As a family, we witnessed her take what would be her final breath. We couldn't readily see it, but her heart had finally given out at 2:34am. In the end, it would be sepsis that would ultimately claim her life. And with that, the woman who birthed me and my three younger siblings was gone.
I was not entirely broken or devastated by that sudden turn of events. Maybe it's because I knew that in the end, her pain finally went away. She could move on, transitioning to the next world. Sure, she would leave her husband and four children behind, but maybe, just maybe she would find herself reunited with her mother. Even as she remained hospitalized since the beginning of August 2018, I had maintained hope that she would recover, at least enough to be able to come home. I always maintained that kind of hope, dating back to her previous hospitalizations, that kind that always made me believe that she would home soon. After that fateful October morning, we knew that Mom would be back, but not in the form that we would have wanted. Even as I write this, she remains in perpetual dust form in that nice little cube-shaped urn that my sister picked out. Her final resting place remains that urn, which itself has become a fixture on top of the mantle at Dad's house.
Pain gone. Body gone. Her spirit still lives on in our hearts, while her wisdom remains etched in our minds. That's all we have of her, as well as the memories that we built during our childhood and for Dad, all that they created during their 43-year marriage.
Mom would have been 74 this year back in May. This would be one of now seven birthdays that we would celebrate, in our own unique ways, without her.
I could very look at the date of Mom's death as that dreaded anniversary, but I don't. Obviously, the day that she died isn't necessarily a happy time for me, but I'm not as broken up by it as one might be led to believe. It's more bittersweet than anything else, I guess. I suppose I've come to accept that she's gone, although I came to grips with that reality minutes after she died.
Mom's gone. Those two words have never been easy to utter. Maybe that's why I don't say them often? Besides, I don't need the reminder.
I am well aware that she's not here anymore.
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