What they don't tell you

CW: cancer, death

MARGARET DUFRESNE, 1968

This is what it says in faded pencil on the back of the photo. All caps, so I know my grandfather wrote it. The edges are yellowed now, the colours in the photo muted. I wipe off the teardrop that has just fallen onto it. I found the photo in the attic in an old dusty cardboard box that came from my grandparent’s house when they moved into a retirement villa ten years ago. It’s my mother. She had just been taken home from the hospital, wrapped in her pink baby blanket. She looked so new and fragile. My grandmother was holding her in her arms and smiling down at the small face peeking out of the blanket. It’s so weird to think of my mother being that small, or that she had a whole life before me that I really don’t know much about. I suppose that I’ll have a life after her, too.

They don’t tell you that the house feels empty in a way that it has never felt before. It’s not like being home alone like any other day, it feels like the house may never feel full again. What used to feel like a home, a place of comfort, now feels like nothing more than drywall and a foundation. It doesn’t wrap you in its warmth like a scarf and invites you in, but instead feels boxy, hopeless.

My mother passed away six days ago, but it feels like it has been much longer. She got sick when I was fourteen. She managed to hang on for four more years after her diagnosis, and it has been the hardest four years of my life. I am so grateful that she was there to be my mom during the harder parts of growing up, and that she was there to usher me into adulthood and try her best to prepare me for the real world. Some people don’t even get that much.

They don’t tell you how hard it is to watch someone try to be strong for you when you know how much they are suffering. My mother always tried to smile. Despite the poking and prodding, the chemo that made her too sick to eat and made her hair fall out in clumps, she always greeted me with a smile. I knew that she was hurting, that there was pain behind her eyes, but at the time neither of us could acknowledge it. I regret that. My mother should not have to have been that strong for my sake. I wish I had let her hold my hand and sob. I wish I could have been the pillar of comfort she needed to lean on in her final years in a way I never insisted on giving her.

She was strong for me until her very last breaths. It had been a bad week for her, so I bought her some of her favourite chocolate from a bakery downtown after school. I didn’t know if she would be able to eat it that day, but it felt like something that would make her happy anyway. I walked into her hospital room, or what I thought was her hospital room, but there was someone else in her bed. I hastily apologized to the person in the room and as I was turning around to leave, I heard a frail and strained voice call my name. It was her. I didn’t recognize my own mother. Her skin looked much paler than usual, her eyes sunken and desolate. It was like she got smaller even though I saw her only the day before last. I held her hand and it felt foreign to me. Too bony, too cold. She managed to eat one square of the chocolate I bought her, but I could tell she was forcing it. We talked, she tried to laugh. I stayed so long that dinner had long come and gone. Even visiting hours came to a close, but even I could tell that my mother was fading to the point where visiting hours no longer applied to me.

I went to get a snack from the vending machine when I was stopped by a nurse I had come to know well. She told me that my mother was waiting. I asked her what she meant, and she told me that she was waiting for me to leave so that she could let go.

The words hit me like a truck. Without getting a snack, I ran back to my mother’s room. I got right in her bed, and I held her one last time. I told her I loved her, and I packed up my backpack to leave. I knew it was my turn to be strong for her. I said goodbye, and instead of leaving sat on the floor not far from her room. It didn’t take long after I left, she really was waiting for me to say goodbye.

They don’t tell you about how long the sound of a flatlining heart monitor can stay with you. I hear it in the shower, when I try to sleep, when I make my tea in the morning. I knew it was coming, and yet I still wasn’t prepared. I never understood how people say it’s better when you know it’s coming. Whether I had four years or four seconds, my mother is still gone, and it hurts just the same.

There was no code blue, no running and panic. The DNR placed on my mother’s door had sealed her exit in stone.

She was gone.

They don’t tell you how hard it is to lose your mother, because nobody can put it into words.

Six days after I lost her, I sit in the attic clutching this photo of her just entering this world. She has come and gone. Our time in this world is a mere flicker amongst the cosmos, but Margaret Dufresne made my flicker that much brighter.