On July 16, 2019, around 7:00 am, my mother’s soul took flight to the next life, as I held her tightly in my arms. Four years ago, I wrote this story. I share it now in honor of her life and memory.
My Mother’s Parting Gift
It was Monday night. I tried wheeling my mother’s hospital bed out of her room and into mine, so that I could sleep next to her, but when I couldn’t scoot it through the doorway, I realized that it had been assembled in the room and was too large to get out. Somehow I managed to haul in my queen size mattress and box spring, which I placed right up against my mother’s hospital bed. I lit candles and burned incense until I had administered the last dose of Haldol and Morphine for the night, and it was time to sleep.
I had asked one of the hospice on-call nurses what she believed about the relationship between the soul, breath, heart, and body during the time of transition – specifically, when does the soul leave? She had told me she believes that the soul departs before the body shuts down. That notion put a damper on my experience being with my mother, so I decided the belief was not serving me and that I needed to outright reject it.
But really, I didn’t know.
“Mommy,” I said, “If you’re still here, please don’t transition until the morning, because it will freak the fuck out of me if you go in the night.” With that, I blew out the candles, arranged myself under the covers, and curled up next to my beloved mother, holding her left hand.
At 6:00 am, I woke up, needing to pee. My mother was still breathing – a shallow, raspy breath with a fast rhythm. After going to the bathroom, I was hit with a tidal wave of emotion, realizing that I had screwed up royally and that it was my fault my mother was dying. I grabbed my computer and began journaling on my bed, eager to chronicle all the ways I had fucked up, before losing track of the details. I was in excruciating psychological and emotional pain. I had made a fatal mistake, and there was no turning back. Here my mother lay, actively in process of leaving this body, this life, and transitioning to the next one. The train had departed and was en route to its next destination, with nothing I could do then to stop it.
Within an hour, I heard a gap in my mother’s rhythmic breath. One of the nurses had told me that gap happens, and gets longer, as people near the end. “It’s starting,” I thought, dumping my computer on the floor and flinging myself on my mother’s chest, my left hand underneath her right side, my right hand in her left, holding tight everywhere. I lay with my ear over her heart, as I had loved doing over the years. Hearing her heartbeat always had grabbed the attention of my entire body, my entire being, instantaneously setting me back in alignment – the first rhythm, the first sound of Life, returning me to center and calm.
But now, her heart felt void of soul. It was a mechanical pump, pushing into my ear with each beat – the pacemaker, I realized, wondering with faint horror if it would keep going after she stopped breathing, and what I would do in that case. But it was a fleeting thought. Otherwise, it was just my mother and me, connected, breathing together, our hearts beating their respective rhythms, as the morning sun beamed on us through the window overlooking the forest. I was acutely present, in the moment, attuned to every sensation, in a way I do not recall having been before, certainly not since I was a very young child.
The gaps between my mother’s breaths became longer; the pumping against my ear became more gentle; and the rhythm of my mother’s heartbeat began to fade, like at the end of a beautiful song – until all at once, in concert, everything stopped.
Silence. Stillness. A pervasive sense of beauty and peace.
My mother gasped a breath. Silence. Stillness. She gasped another breath. With that, her Soul left the body that had birthed me into this world, going out as I had come in – with me lying on her chest and holding her hand, or in that case, grasping her adult finger inside my tiny baby fist.
We lay like that for hours, the two of us, with me keeping blankets over her body, to retain the warmth of her life force as long as possible, and a t-shirt over her eyes, so that I could not see the death. Until I had a knowing, “She’s not here anymore; it’s time to let go;” and I did, reluctantly, aware that it would be our last embrace.
I stood up and gazed upon what I then, in that moment, saw clearly – not as my mother, but as the body, the vessel, the temporary container of my mother. I felt a sudden, acute, breathtaking, awareness of her vastness, expansive well beyond what had been her physical home for 84-plus years.
I did not lose her. She was suddenly everywhere.
A few days later, I opened up one of the many computer files I have with audio recordings of our conversations over the years. While I’m a full-on computer file pack rat – everything is there, somewhere – I always have been so busy living, moving forward, that I haven’t had the time to organize my copious amounts of files, on the computer or elsewhere. So it was pretty random what I would open, given that the files were haphazardly gathered in several “audio recordings” folders with a litany of files inside.
Unbelievably – was my mother already communicating with me in new ways? – the first one I opened dove straight into a conversation where I was expressing to my mother my fear of losing her. “I’m not going anywhere,” she replied. “I’ll be in the corner, and you can call me on the purple telephone.” I had been anxious about my mother’s death for years, so we had talked about the possibility extensively. The purple telephone was an art piece my mother had made for me out of paper – a beautiful, old-fashioned phone with a rotating dial. Having been overbearing and invasive throughout my childhood, her promise to be in the corner was a way of ensuring that we would connect only if and when I wanted.
Uncannily, the next audio recording I opened was my mother speaking directly to my feelings of responsibility in losing her, although she had said the words years prior: “Loolwa. Loolwa! You’re a human being. It was a confusing situation. You can’t always be perfect.”
I’d been my mother’s caregiver for eleven years, through a traumatic brain injury, dementia, and multiple life threatening emergencies in between – watching over her like a hawk and protecting her like a mother bear, successfully intervening in more than 10 counts of medical negligence over the years. But the last one was such a clusterfuck of circumstances outside my control that, for the first time, I failed to save her. Worse yet, this particular incident of negligence sent my mother into a tailspin of pain and delirium that caused her terrible suffering and took 24 hours for me to get under control – following which my mother fell into a deep sleep and never woke up again.
My mother knows me well. “You’re too hard on yourself,” she repeatedly told me over the years. “You need to give yourself slack.” In a way, it’s not surprising that she managed to communicate that very sentiment to me again, from the afterlife. She probably knew I was busy beating myself up and, scrappy sort that she was, figured out a way to get through to me.
I’m still busy beating myself up, these ten months later, but far less frequently and harshly. The weekend after losing my mother, I met Quinn, a friend’s housemate, with whom I had an instant and profound connection. He lived on the other side of the water from me and didn’t have a car, but biked and took a ferry to see me daily. He held me tight when I was lost and flailing around and when I was screaming and feeling suicidal. He also had an uncanny way of saying things that I desperately needed to hear:
When I told him that I wanted to write down all the ways I had screwed up in taking care of my mother, he gently replied, “OK, but when you do that, just make sure you also write down all the amazing things you did to take care of her.” When I told him I was lost at sea after losing my mother, he said, “Well, then you’ll just keep sailing for now, until you find your new landing place.”
I have no doubt that my mother set me up with Quinn, as her parting gift, to make sure I had someone holding me tight and looking after me when she was gone. After all, her signature was all over my encounter with him.
During the last year of my mother’s life, she and I had incessant power struggles over how much she drank coffee and how little she drank water or ate food. I alternately bribed and cajoled her to drink more water and less coffee, and when she wasn’t looking, I sneaked protein powder or extra hot water into her coffee cup.
Five days after my mother transitioned to the next life, I woke up at my friend’s co-op. I needed coffee, and as it turned out, Quinn was the only one who drank it. Not only did he bring me a cup, but he kindly obliged when I came downstairs to ask for a second. We got to talking while the coffee was brewing, and we didn’t stop talking until late that night, when I left. Within a week, we were a couple, and within four months, Quinn had moved to a house just 10 minutes away from me. Not only did he hold me tight through the storm of losing my mother, but we sheltered in place during the pandemic lockdown – which would have been extra hellish to go through alone, while still in the throes of grief.
In late April, as Quinn lay in bed, and as I sat by his side, he got a text from his landlady, asking if he was coming back in May. “Am I?” he asked, looking up at me. “No,” I answered, smiling.
Thanks Mom.
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