My deathbed second thoughts

[xchrom]

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/22/my_deathbed_second_thoughts/


I walk into our kitchen. My mother is standing at the kitchen sink, whistling to the red cardinals in the plumeria tree. As I hurry to slip past her, she turns and looks at me as though her gaze could wrap its arms around me. “I love you so much,” she says softly. I roll my eyes and tsk, responding as an independent 13-year-old striking out to sever the umbilical cord. My mother is cut down to silence.

Without warning, a week later my 8-year-old brother wakes me in the morning saying, “Mommy’s sick, and she’s throwing up.” I respond as I think she would and bring her a tray with cinnamon-sugar toast and orange juice. I tell her I will take my brothers down to the playground so she can sleep. When we return three hours later, her bed is empty. There is a note from a neighbor that she has taken my mother to the hospital. A neighbor comes over to stay with us while our father is with our mother in the hospital long into the night. It is a long, lonely day and night without answers. I write a letter to God trying to describe my confusion and asking God to let her come home.

The next day my grandparents fly in from California to visit their daughter and grandchildren. It feels like a vacuum in the house: the air is still, people move slowly, and no one speaks about what is happening. I am too afraid to ask questions. My father and grandparents go to the hospital and tell us it is better that we wait at home. That evening my grandmother bursts into the living room, hysterical, and I cannot understand what she is saying. My grandfather follows her into the house, comes to me, and holds me. “Your mother took a turn for the worse,” he says gently. At least she’s not dead, I say silently to myself. And then he follows with, “She died tonight.”

My parents had not talked to my two younger brothers and me about the Guillain-Barre syndrome that had already cut short the lives of six out of eight patients diagnosed in our state. We did not understand what the illness was or that it could cause my mother’s death. We did not know about the unpredictable and intractable pain associated with the neurological illness, and why my mother did not get out of bed for days at a time as she used alcohol to cope with her fear and uncertain future. We did not see our mother leave her bed for the hospital, and in an effort to spare us, we were not allowed to visit her. In my mind, she was home one moment and dead the next. No one was home to comfort three young children. I was the oldest, but I did not feel that I had the knowledge or skills to help my younger brothers. No one was there to help me.

[murielm99]

1. I wonder sometimes if that is how my

mother felt. Her mother died of tuberculosis when my mother was ten. She had not seen her mother in a year, except for one time, when her mother waved to her from a window in the sanitarium where she was staying.

My mother is a very damaged person. Maybe no one ever helped her.

[xchrom]

2. I think we were clueless - for a long time - about

What to do for people who were close to the terminally ill.

[intaglio]

3. There are no words n/t

[varelse]

4. K&R

"My young friend risked saying the wrong thing, as we are all afraid we might, in order to acknowledge my new world that I was trying so desperately to navigate"