A Few Lessons I learned from Death

I held my phone in my hand, the dial tone echoing through my head. That's it. It's happened. The tears slipped from my eyes before I realized I was crying, and I closed my eyes and just sobbed. It was 5 in the morning, and I was sobbing on a pile of clean clothing I had to fold that day. My ex husband was getting ready for work, and heard me. He walked out of the bathroom cautiously, as he had never seen me cry before. "What's going on?" he asked fearfully.

"My mom died," I said to him. I couldn't stop crying, but I didn't know why I was crying. Truth be told, my mom was not a good parent. Sure, she was "there" for us in the sense that she was the parent that didn't leave us, but I had been raising my brother since he was 13 - not her. I think I was crying because I was supposed to - everyone is supposed to be sad when your parent dies, right? I was crying for myself, my son that I was 7 months pregnant with, and my 19 year old brother. We expected this to happen, just not this soon.

My mom had had a procedure done on her brain - she had an aneurysm and the doctors tried a new thing called 'coiling' where they would put a coiled wire in her vein and 'shoot' it at the aneurysm to kill it - like a tiny whip. The doctors had neglected to see there was an artery on the other side of the aneurysm, so when they killed the aneurysm, it blocked the artery in her brain, causing her to have a stroke. Which, of course, led to swelling in the brain. The hospital took out the left half of her brain in order to relieve the intercranial pressure, but did not tell the family they had done so. They told us they had opened her skull to relieve the pressure - which would explain the staples in her head from her forehead all the way to the nape of her neck.

We spent months visiting her in the hospital while she was in a coma. The staff kept telling us she wasn't aware of us, that she wasn't going to wake up - but we kept showing up. We had so much hope that something one of us did would trigger her into waking up, even if we made her so mad she had to argue. My mom liked to argue and she liked to be right, so we would tell her things we knew she didn't like in the hope that she would get mad enough to wake up. It never worked, of course. There was one time we began playing one of her favorite songs by Queen and her toes started tapping the bed frame. Everyone got so excited and the doctors assured us that there was no chance, we were seeing things and misinterpreting them. There were many times I yelled at the doctors, but they ignored me and chalked it up to pregnancy. Eventually, I had to go back home because I was still in the army and my leave time was over. I left my brother in charge of things with my mom and I flew back to my duty station.

After 6 months in a coma at the hospital, the hospital informed us they needed to transfer her to a nursing home for better care. Strange to think about your mother, who's only 44, needing to be in a nursing home, right? We reluctantly agreed. After a month in the nursing home, we got a call from the staff there, letting us know that our mom had had a heart attack. This was terrifying for my brother and I, as we knew she didn't have a great heart to begin with. We started putting everything together to get her put on a list for heart transplants - after all, she would someday wake up and need a good heart for that. She was our mom, so she had to wake up. Nothing could kill her.

The transplant list office denied us. They said that in order to qualify for a transplant, the person needs to have a good chance at surviving the surgery and have enough years of life left that it made sense to use a limited resource (human heart) on them. Cold way to think of it, but it makes sense. This is when we found out the hospital removed half of her brain - by finding out 6 months later that she wasn't qualified for a transplant because there was never any chance of her waking up in the first place. 

The defeat I felt that day was deafening. That was the first day in my life I had ever been so angry and so defeated that I wanted to physically attack the doctors. They had failed us, from the beginning, letting us have hope for 7 months that someday she would wake up. She never would have wanted to be in a coma for any period of time, especially if there was a chance she would have never woken up. She was not a good mother, but she was the only parent we had, so we didn't want to lose her, too. While I was hurting, I knew my brother was hurting more. He had always been a "mama's boy". 

The nursing home came to us with a difficult choice after we were turned down for the transplant list. She had had 3 heart attacks within the span of 2 weeks, and each heart attack she had was making her weaker. I was still at my duty station so my 19 year old brother had to sign a Do Not Resuscitate form on the only parent he'd ever known. He felt so guilty about this, as if he were signing her death warrant. Many nights I sat up with him on the phone while he cried about this. Many nights I sat up, crying, and not really knowing why. I was so angry at the doctors, at my mom and at life. I was trying to make my life better, and the universe knew I had a bad childhood - and now, at 20, it was taking the only parent I had ever known. 

Within a week, the nursing home had to use the DNR form because she had another heart attack. She passed away from "natural" causes, as natural as it could be in this situation. When she passed away, I was mad. I was furious with my lot in life. I blamed the universe and everyone in it. Nothing had prepared me for this. I also felt relieved, a lot, but I was ashamed of that. What kind of psycho feels relieved when their mom dies? I was concerned that I felt relieved because I was mad at her for my life - was I actually happy that she died? Was I happy because we were always fighting? Does that make me even worse of a person, to be happy my mom passed away? 

I've had time to come to terms with this. I used my mom's death as a way to change my life. I eat heart healthy now, and I make my kids aware of heart issues and diabetes. I found out that it's okay to be relieved when someone dies. She was suffering in a coma. My mom was a loud, boisterous person and she would never choose to be in a situation where she wasn't able to express herself. I was relieved that her suffering was over. I had been partially blaming myself for keeping her in a coma for so long when I knew she wouldn't want that - I was selfish because I wanted to keep her around. It's a selfishness I've learned to live with and understand it's acceptable in most cases to want that. When I realized my relief was due to her not suffering anymore, I felt freed from guilt. I'm a good person. I didn't want her to die, I just didn't want her to suffer anymore. I'm sure everyone that's ever been close to death can understand the humanity in that. There's something peaceful about being able to acknowledge things about yourself that aren't the best, and just accepting them. Society had taught me for so long that grief was supposed to be a certain way, and I wasn't prepared when my grief wasn't fitting into their little box. That's all it was.

Now that my kids are teens, I can explain to them who their grandmother was, and leave out the bad parts I knew of her. She wasn't a good mom, but that's really not important when I tell my kids about the grandma they never got. My son found my mother's "Best of Queen" cd and they're now one of his favorite bands. My kids know that she did her best and my job is to do better than she did, and their jobs are to do better than I did. Death is a horrible thing most days, but it is cyclical.

Life leads to death and death leads to life.