Grief is weird and hard

August 28, 2021. It has been eighty-seven days since my mom passed away.

I told myself I’d write about my journey through grief, but up to this point, I haven’t been able to make myself sit down and write, or if I did, nothing came to me. Even this attempt has had several false starts.

I found myself writing about the facts of what happened, but not about what I’ve felt or experienced in the days since. Am I trying to avoid facing my emotions? I honestly don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m running from my feelings, but nor am I dwelling in them.

The Facts Please

Mom had advanced COPD. Technically, she was in pulmonary failure. By about April, Mom had been in the hospital more than she’d been home, each time because of significant difficulty breathing. In the middle of a pandemic, Mom was not fighting Covid, but fighting her own dying lungs.

To complicate things, Mom broke her hip.

Dad had his own health issues, and we were in the process of getting him diagnosed and treated for Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH). He had surgery to help alleviate its symptoms, and at one point, both my parents were in different hospitals at the same time. In fact, I spent most of Mother’s Day with Dad in the ER to follow up with complications from his surgery.

There is a part of me that wonders if I knew how little time we had if I would have changed my plans. The key words? ‘If I only knew.’

Fast forward a couple of weeks.

The afternoon of Mom’s passing, in early June, I was in Oregon, visiting my partner. Mom was recovering from her broken hip, and had been admitted to the hospital a few days earlier for a blood clot. She was on the mend from the clot when she had a bowel obstruction. It seemed she was on the mend from that, but then I got a text from my sister that something was up with Mom.

I called her nurse. Mom was unresponsive. Her glucose levels had plummeted. They had given her glucose, and we were going to wait and see what happened. Oh and she had changed her mind from the previous month when she’d said she wanted them to do everything they could so that she would live.

Mom had a DNR. I was asked if I wanted to honor it.. That Mom had a DNR was news to me given the conversation we’d had at the end of March. 

Holy shit. Her nurse asked me if I wanted them to keep Mom alive.

Did I want to honor the DNR?

If she’d absolutely changed her mind, then yes. I felt uncertainty because it wasn’t what she’d discussed with Dad and me. .I wanted to honor her wishes, but at the same time, I didn’t want to lose my mom. She’d always been a fighter. Had she really decided it was time?

Uncertainty and anxiety came crashing in on me, but I knew I wanted to honor her wishes. I needed to be certain. She was unresponsive, so the only person we could check with was the hospital minister, who also happened to be standing in for our family’s regular minister, who was on vacation. The nurse was going to track him down for me.

After I got off the phone with the nurse, a call came in from the rehab facility. Could Dad’s friend take him to visit Mom?

I understand why facilities need to get that kind of permission, but for fuck’s sake. . .Mom was dying and asking for Dad. YES. For the love of EVERYTHING, YES.

The nurse called. The glucose worked, and Mom was lucid. The hospital minister confirmed she had changed her mind and was at peace with the DNR. She asked for Dad.

Part of me thought we were out of the woods. I thought Mom was still a fighter, and she was going to be ok. Another part of me, though, had a feeling that this time was different.

In the midst of everything, I was trying to figure out how to get home. My partner was by my side, talking things out with me. I booked a flight home the very next morning: it was the best I could do.

I don’t know how much time had passed since the first call where she was unresponsive. An hour may have passed, perhaps more? The afternoon was a blur. Sometime after I booked my return flight, my phone rang again.

Mom was gone.

My world closed in on me. I remember looking to my partner and telling her I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave. I knew, though, that I had to . . .I needed to be there for Dad and my sister.

I knew everything was going to be different. I had no idea how different.

Notice how I still focused on facts more so than emotions?

The truth is, my emotions were a jumble that Wednesday, and in the aftermath, I struggle recalling exactly what I felt, though I do know I felt fear, sadness and love.

Making Sense of Emotions

I think part of me struggles with the fact that I was a couple of thousand miles away when Mom died, but at the same time. . .I was not alone. In fact, I think it was the first time I wasn’t alone when receiving such heavy news.

I was held with such love throughout the afternoon by my partner. She simply held me in the moments after receiving the news of Mom’s passing. She’d been the voice of logic and reason when trying to sort out travel to Louisiana. In the days and weeks since, she has been a rock for me, even when she’s walked a hard and heavy path of her own. For her unwavering love, I am so very grateful.

Just about thirteen hours after Mom passed away, I was waiting for a flight to take me to New Orleans to be with my family.

But how did I feel?

A mix of numbness and sadness. The numbness was perhaps shock. Perhaps not. Disbelief? Though, to me, disbelief is akin to shock, in a way.

Travel from Oregon to Louisiana was a blur. The next several days were a blur with everything that we needed to sort out for Mom’s funeral. Thankfully, she and Dad had taken care of almost everything in terms of funeral arrangements.

I know I dreaded the day of her funeral. There were times where I felt like a cartoon character digging my heels in to avoid going off a cliff, yet momentum and cartoon physics were against me.

I dreaded the funeral because I knew the hardest times would come in the days and months after.

I wanted to write about the grieving process as I was going through it, but I couldn’t bring myself to write about it until eighty-some-odd days after Mom passed. And even now, I find it hard to actually write about what I feel beyond deep sadness. Coupled with that, though, is a sense of relief that Mom is no longer struggling to breathe and she is at peace.

Perhaps next time, I will tell you more about my Mom and her fierce spirit and contagious smile.

Perhaps next time, I’ll even tell you a bit more about me.

No guarantees on how often I will post here. No guarantees on how often I will change the way this site looks, or what content I put here. Right now? It’s just where I randomly ramble.