Last Friday, my mom had a stroke. This past week has been one of the most absolutely emotionally draining periods in my entire life.
She came home yesterday and it looks like she will bounce back with very few long-standing problems. However, when I saw her last weekend I could not have known that. I remember looking down at her in the hospital bed and wondering if I would ever really hear her voice again, ever really know her as a person again.
Last Friday night my Dad came home from a football game (he works at a school and had to go to work) and heard her getting out of bed. She got up to take out her contacts and take her pills before she fell asleep, only when she tried to take out her contacts her left arm curled up into a useless hook and she collapsed to the ground. She called out to my dad. When he got there he could tell what was going on. Her speech was slurred and her left side was paralyzed. Being my mother though, she argued with him. Told him she would be fine with some rest and some water.
I’ve known for awhile now that I need to prepare myself emotionally for the eventual loss of my parents. I’m only 28 but my mother is already 64. She’s not old enough in my mind to be facing her mortality, but she’s not getting any younger. I feel like we really dodged a bullet here. She’s almost completely back to her old self, but for most of this past week I felt like she was made of glass. I was so afraid that at any minute we would lose her.
I haven’t had the best relationship with my mother in my adult years. That’s not to say there is animosity between us, but we are very different people. I have always been so much more like my father, her husband of 33 years, the man she can’t live with and can’t live without. I’ve often prayed for them to divorce, so they could each find happiness but somehow, for some reason they labor on together. It almost killed me to hear her say, in her sedated stupor that “nobody cared” about her and that “he wasn’t going to come back” if he left for a break. I had to remind her that he had been with her since the prior evening, that he had not slept in almost 24 hours, and that he had walked all the way home after riding to the hospital in the ambulance to get her some fresh clothes and to bring the medication she’d been taking. I wanted to think that her outburst was the sedation and medication, but I’d heard it from her before without any chemical prompting.
The truth is he needs her as much as she needs him. That much was apparent this week. For all of her complaining and bitching and moaning throughout the years, he’s taken it all like water off a duck’s back. And he’s shown a dedication and loyalty to family that I can only hope to live up to some day.
For all of my complaining and bitching, and as annoyed as I get with them sometimes I very dearly love my parents and I am not ready to lose them.
I haven’t gotten a chance to cry yet. I think I need to go make time to do that.
