Tea With Me: 20th November, 2018 Tuesday

I haven’t really been home for two years. Inside home. I don’t know how many of you know what that means. I do.

My Mama’s last Thanksgiving was two years ago and we all gathered. I knew she would wait until I got there to crash. And she did. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer 7 weeks before through a series of non invasive tests. She didn’t want to do the biopsy route. At 89 and in astounding arthritic pain she had been ready to go for quite a long time.

I had known the previous February her body was cooking what would finally take her. She had had a cellulitis skin infection on her shin which she had ignored and carefully not mentioned to anyone who might have treated it before it got out of hand the way it had to have put her in the hospital for four days while they waited for the biggest antibiotic on the planet to kill it.

I had flown in from up North to spell my brother for the weekend as she was released from the hospital not knowing if she was truly on the upswing. I nursed her for four days while my siblings who had care for her adjusted to her new level of care needs. It broke my heart to leave her as she made it very clear how much it would have pleased her to have me assume the position of her full time carer. She had dreaded for decades the moment that she might need a stranger to take care of her. I know it was the right thing for me to leave to let my brother and sister really see the level of her need without my making it invisible for them. My life and home were 1100 miles north. Still, the pull to make it all better for all of them was strong but unrealistic for me to do. So I left them to figure it out.

But I knew that leg infection was an indicator that other things were failing. I knew that something errant was growing in her tissue. And I knew she welcomed it. She was ready.

The months went by and the build to my Eldest’s wedding in that Montana Mountain Meadow consumed my focus. The call came a week before I left for the wedding from my mother and brother letting me know her Doc had hinted that the reason her breathing was so difficult was that dark spots were in her lungs. This was no surprise really. I had been expecting some news about her health that would add to the mix around the wedding given that she was unable to make the journey to witness the marriage of her beloved grand daughter twin to a man who looks so much like her beloved son. Ya, I know, has the hint of xenophobic breeding approval. My daughter, if she ever reads this, will utter the typical, “My God Mother,” which it seems is an utterance I cannot help but inspire in her when I loose the filter she requires.

So I went to the wedding of my Eldest as the Mother of The Bride carrying the shadow of the coming loss which would quake me for a long time. I have a fabulous photo a cousin of my SIL shot of me with my two sisters and there is my Mama on an iphone doing Facetime at the Reception.

There was so very much in that event. The place so ancient and so raw. The gathering of all the families and friends, old and new. All my Lifetimes rolling all around the edge of that lovely lake for four iconic days.

So many ropes that tied me to the dock of my identity were loosening that day. So many truths I had held so rigidly shifted or dissolved in the glow of millions of tiny little wingeds flitting through The Gloaming. Deep Ancient Magic did bless our disparate tribe that weekend. And end was coming in that begining.

And then the seven weeks of waiting. I did not go see her to be with her alone. My children did. And all of her beloveds from other parts of her clan all came and sat and talked with her in her little house. She and I had done all that for oh so many years. We didn’t need to do it any more. I knew she would need me later for the end. So I stayed up North.

Until Thanksgiving.

We arrived Sunday evening and on Monday morning she did have her first clear moment that her time was coming soon. Loopily she told me all about the strange floating in her opioided head as her self administration had increased while her oxygen starved brain could not recall how much she had already taken. So the wheel chair in the corner broke out and Sister Ranch and I loaded her in for a ride to the car and to the Doc to do the test to set up the last sucking out the shit filling in her lungs.

As family arrived that day we had a sit down with her and made it clear she had to have the care she so ragefully insisted she did not need. It was the phrase, “I can diaper myself” which now sources a deep deep chuckle but at the time was just another in the hooks she flung at all of us in our little circle to make us twirl in yet another one of her lifelong puppet master dances. She pierced us, every one.

And then I nailed her to the wall by saying she was being just plain ugly. It was time to call the Spoiled Child in the room a timeout.

Oh she did not like that.

And she oh so brilliantly found the moment to attempt to get me back. She tried to shame me in the middle of the raucus fun we all were having at her table that next night when she recalled the Thanksgiving at my home that she said I had thrown away the frozen spinach she had so preciously brought in favor of the fresh I had acquired. Well, she didn’t get me how badly she wanted because I really didn’t know if that actually had happened and to this day I think she might have made it up just to get me back. The Brat. Oh, how I loved her.

We had the shit in her chest sucked out one last time the day before Thanksgiving and she rebounded in her most beguiling form. Oh yes, she was beguiling, had always had that special something many found so fine. The sparkle, that glamour without the need for artifice of any kind. She was a natural goddess even as she crumbled. Always had that special.

So Turkey Day was fine and fun and uproarious with all the chaos of so many of us that cooked the things that made the feasting fine. And she made it up to the Big House one last glorious time. She loved a party.

The morning after I found myself alone with her down in her little house. She was commenting on how strained we seemed. No duh. I had to tell her this was hard for us. She said, “Oh don’t worry about me. I’m fine really.” I almost could not hold back the laugh. She, at 89, was clueless once again.

I said, “I know you’ll be fine. You are going to the good place. Its us that will hurt for a long time. We will miss you.” She got really quiet then. I told her she had one last job as our Mother and that was to make it easy on us, this thing she was about to do.

She looked at me and put her head down toward her hands, looked to the side and then looked back at me and said, “You’re right.”

We talked about her family who were close by on the other side waiting for her. And my Dad, all those that come when we are close to help us cross. They had come to me in dreams for weeks and she had felt them too. It was the last time she and I had us alone and it was good.

The weekend came and we all saw how quickly her fading washed within her. Monday morning, time to go, I kissed her knowing this would be the last time we talked in any way that was normal.

So home I went and twelve days later my brother called and said she had been a total shit for two days straight, pissed my sainted Sister Ranch to bits, had gone to bed and that am hadn’t gotten up at all. They were waiting for the hospital bed. It was time for me to come.

I booked a flight for the next day and woke up at the crack of dawn. Weather had come in and flights delayed so I landed late in afternoon. I found her in her house asleep in the hospital bed which had been positioned so she could see her favorite view. I didn’t wake her.

The Big House was somber. We all gathered at some point for some form of food and trickled down to say good night. I got there last, to the Little House with her a bit fidgeting for sleep. I had nothing more to say so I started singing. I started singing to her and as I sang she stilled a bit more and more as each song drifted by. And then I thought to sing her lullabies. The ones she had sung to me and all of us, the ones her Papa had sung to her.

I could not remember them as well as I had the last time I had sung them now decades ago to my own wee ones as they struggled off to sleep. I wasn’t really sure if she was happy for my singing or disturbed. Her night nurse said she was settling much better than she had before. I sang a bit more and then kissed her good night.

I truly do not remember the next day except for a moment in the afternoon when I picked up one of my beloved Brother in Laws ancient Martin guitars and played to a napping house in the afternoon. I played “Old Man”. I had newly owned it. I did not think I had an audience but apparently I did.

That night once again, I went down late to say good night and sang her lullabies. I had found the lyrics for the old ones online and sang her several verses of them all. The last was a song about a baby whale having fun in the sea, the one she and I had loved hearing as it played over the intercom as Eldest fell asleep as the wee thing she was at her beginning. It is a song about play and fun and joy and that was my good bye to my Mommy.

I took her dog up to sleep with me at the Big House. I went to bed. And sat bolt upright at 3:20 am thinking did she pass and woke me up and then thought, Na. That’s just the way it works in movies. I went to pee and my phone rang. Brother saying the nurse had just called to say she had gone.

12.12.16.

We sat awhile in that little house. The nurse crew came to ready her for going. There is such a difference in a lifeless body. She was not there anymore. The house got very cold for quite a bit and then it was warm again. I went out on the porch and looked in through the window at her and my two sisters sitting with her form. The husk that had housed her and us and shuffled through all those years with so much force. Empty. A reminder of her, not her at all. She was somewhere else.

I have some photos of that moment, I will not share them here. They are strange and yet important to me. Ones of my sisters with that husk and her loving dog who worked so hard to keep her happy trying to feel her heart in those pulseless fingers.

And then a van came with two men and a gurney. And took my mother’s body away to be no more. I watched the van drive down the driveway feeling I should follow to make sure she was alright and knowing that was a vestigial response like the pain in an amputated limb.

I am missing her today.

I’m done.

Ta.