How to you say goodbye to your mother when it seems likely that it may be the last time you see her? It was something I couldn't stop thinking about last week as I prepared to go visit her and all the days there until it was time for me to go.
My mom is 97 and since last February living with my older brother Larry and his wife Sally. After 3 years in an assisted living facility where a stroke and several injuries requiring long stays in rehab with remarkable recoveries it became clear that she needed more care. Larry and Sally rearranged their home in the hills of eastern Kentucky and along with the help of local hospice care are providing our mom with a sunny room for her last days. She can only sit in a chair for brief periods and spends most of her time in bed sleeping. She seemed to drift between strange dreams and odd memories to moments of awareness that she will not be recovering this time. At these moments she makes her wishes plain with statement “I don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t know what to do about it.”
There are no words that can express how grateful I am to Larry and Sally for what they are doing for our mom. That she will have the loving hands of family caring for her in her final days is an amazing gift. They practice the tenets of their christian faith more selflessly than anybody I know. They have built a little eden on the side of a hill with terraced gardens overlooking pastures of grazing cows and horses. It’s a beautiful peaceful place far removed from the world I inhabit in New York, but very fitting for our mom’s final stop — surrounded by gardens like the gardens she always had wherever she made a home.
So after several days of quiet walks in the garden, great meals and forthright discussions about the practical matters of end of life care, it was coming near the time to say goodbye and I was fearful I wouldn’t be able to say the right thing. I was afraid I would’t be able to make my mom understand how much I loved her and appreciated everything that she did for me. I have recently been going through family albums and doing genealogy research in order to write a family history. When I got to my immediate family history I gained a renewed appreciation for my mother. A child of the Great Depression, she was the ultimate care-giver beginning when she was a teenager having to care for her grandmother. She became a wife and mother during WWII, raised three sons, moved her household seven times, cared for her parents in their final days, cared for her elderly aunt in her final days and cared for her husband for nine years as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Even though my brothers and I have taken different paths in life and become very different men, we will always be a family of brothers because of our mom and her unconditional support and love.
My family tends to favor quiet stoicism rather than big displays of emotion when facing tragedy and loss. Now that I’m facing my mother’s mortality as well as my own, I find that I’m embarrassingly prone to crying like a baby at the most trivial expressions of sentimentality, even if it's just in a movie or TV show. So I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to Mom without blubbering uncontrollably. When I went into her room she looked at me sadly and talked again of not knowing what to do. I told her that I knew she would get through this. I reminded her of all the tough things she got through before and she was still strong enough to figure this out too. She relaxed a bit and said, “I had a good life.” I told her I loved her because I was a beneficiary of that good life. She smiled for the first time since I’d been there and said, “Kiss me so I can feel your mustache tickle.” So I did and I knew she understood how I felt. By now the tears were coming and I couldn’t speak. I saw the determination and strength in her eyes and still smiling she dismissed me saying, “OK, carry on.”
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