Seven years ago today, Mom would take her final breath. That miracle I referenced in my last entry would never happen. I wasn't holding my breath. Maybe a small part of me was hopeful, but I had no reason to think that Mom was suddenly going to snap out it and come back, after she had been lying there in that hospital bed, dying for the last nearly nine hours.
While we weren't all asleep, I knew that the fatigue was steadily setting in. Midnight had already come and gone and we had reached a point where we didn't know for how much longer this was going to continue. We hadn't anticipated that Mom would have managed to hang on for this long.
At 1am, nothing had changed. Mom was still breathing. Her heart was still ticking. She hadn't regained consciousness. She wasn't moving, at least not in a voluntary capacity. This is pretty much how she looked when I first got there the day before at just before 4pm.
Then the clock struck 2am. Mom had not changed one bit from the past hour. She looked the same. We were genuinely wondering, not if, but when everything was going to happen.
In know that at one point, Dad had rhetorically asked Mom:
Why won't you just go already?
Dad was ready. I think he had been ready. Deep down, I believe that my siblings and I were ready as well. We were no longer waiting for that miracle. In the meantime, the clock continued ticking. Maybe we were tired of waiting?
As it turned out, Mom would not make it to 3am. At 2:30am, one of the nurses who had been monitoring Mom's heart rate came into the room and told us (and I'm paraphrasing here):
Her heart is slowing down. Should be a few more minutes.
As a family (Dad, my sister, and my brother), we stood up and gathered around Mom's bed. We looked at her, as she lie there, still breathing, albeit in a slowed and almost shallow manner, and very much unconscious. I suppose I could have said "asleep", but I'm not trying to be poetic. Mom had reached a point where we couldn't readily tell if she was still breathing. At many times during these last few hours we would ask each other if Mom was in fact still breathing. We didn't know it at the time, but we would all witness her take what would be her final breath.
At 2:34am, that same nurse came back into the room and told us, with a certain confidence in his tone:
She's gone.
He confirmed that the heart monitor was no longer detecting a heart beat and with that, Mom was gone. Finally. Physically. Medically. Definitively. I tried not to look at her body as she lie there, now lifeless, but I did. It was hard not to. I knew that this would be the very last time that I would see Mom, in her physical state, even as she was now lifeless.
Even though Mom never opened her eyes in the time that I was there, I like to think she could hear us and everything that was transpiring around her. She knew that we were there, from beginning to the very end. At least, I think she knew.
My siblings and I already knew what we were going to do with Mom, as far as her final arrangements. I think that as the night progressed, we knew, but we never said anything until Mom was already gone. Dad didn't interject in the slightest either. My guess is that he remained quiet, because he wanted Mom's children to make those decisions, without his influence, involvement, or opinion.
In the end and as we stood in the hallway just outside the room where Mom had just died, the decision was made to have Mom cremated. There was no hesitation when we came to this agreement and we almost replied in unison when I asked how we were going to lay Mom to rest. I'll go into those details in a future entry, as to why this decision came as easily as it did.
Dad and my sister would handle all of those arrangements and Dad would pay for it all. My brother and I were ready to provide any money that would have been requested of us, but in the end, Dad handled all expenses related to Mom's cremation. I believe that Dad and my sister both paid for Mom's urn, being that my sister did not have the finances to pay for the urn by herself. Again, my brother and I were not asked to fork over a single dime, even though we were both prepared to do so.
We all parted ways just before 3am. I drove my brother home, as his wife had left the hospital hours earlier because she had to work the next day. His house was on the way anyway, so it didn't take me too far from the freeway.
I don't think I was numb in the aftermath of everything that happened. Well, maybe I was, just a little? I was saddened, but also somewhat relieved. I had a lot of things going through my head.
At age 67, the woman who gave birth to me was now gone. Her husband and her four children were now left to continue on with their lives without her. As Mom's life ended, the rest of our lives were going to be different. That would take some adjustment obviously, but I think that we all handled Mom's death as best we could.
Mom might be gone in the physical capacity, but she continues to live on in our hearts.
Mama Amnesiac (1951 - 2018)
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