… and while I can’t get my brain to switch off, I’m not particularly emotional.
We’d been through the exercise before. My mother had been on dialysis for eight years because of a rare kidney disease I can’t even pronounce. The dialysis and her age (she was 74) conspired to weaken her tissues. Two years ago a routine colonoscopy resulted in a severe perforation of her colon, and it’s been downhill since then. With repeated surgeries and the attendant heart failures, heart valve replacement, sudden drops in blood pressure and infections, she had made (we calculated today) more than 20 trips to emergency rooms in two years. She’d lost her sight, could no longer walk and was barely able to feed herself. There were two helicopter trips to a faraway hospital (we live 100 miles from Colorado’s Front Range, where the top hospitals in the area are) and late-night calls from Pop too numerous to count. She’d spent over 100 days in intensive care, another four months in hospital beds and the last week of her life in a nursing home. Her final chopper ride came a week before Christmas, and she finally returned from the hospital a week ago. My father, meanwhile, had spent dozens of nights in motel rooms and on the sofa of the ICU waiting room at Poudre Valley Hospital, had drained their savings just to be with her as much as possible (insurance, MediCare and AARP paid almost all the bills) and had himself been dangerously ill from the stress and long hours by her bedside.
This morning, Pop called me at work – again – to say that Mom had been in dialysis and her blood pressure had dropped – again. She was in the emergency room at the local hospital, a chopper was en route – the whole nightmare was starting again. They would get her blood pressure back up, stabilize her, send her to PVH.
It was not to be. An hour after she was rushed into the emergency room, my father, one of my brothers and I were ushered into the private alcove just off the ER – that place you walk past and don’t realize is for a special use until you are taken there for that reason. I knew what was coming – when a doctor says “attempted” three times in one sentence, you have a clue – but when he said it, I just looked at Pop and Andy and thought, “That’s it? No deathbed vigil? No long, slow slide into eternity? Just … ‘She didn’t make it.’?”
For the last six months we’d tried to prepare for her death, sometimes almost hoped for it as she grew weaker, lost her eyesight, became an invalid and, in the depths of a coma, shook her head back and forth like a madwoman. And suddenly, after a brief period of recovery, a week-long flirtation with hope, there it was, popping in like an unexpected visitor for a cup of coffee and a chat. “Oh, I’m sorry, were you not ready? Bad luck, that. Poor timing and all, wouldn’t you say?” I don’t know why I imagine Death speaking with a London accent – maybe it’s the politeness of it all. “I do hope you had time to tell her you love her – a bit too late for that now, I’m afraid.”
The arrangements are amazingly brief – she’ll be cremated, we’ll bury her ashes in the columbarium at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver in the next week or so; we’ll gather for a memorial, tell stories, sit up late into the night with Pop and drink Scotch until he finally cries.
Damn, I am going to miss her.
