A Paradox of Grief
Reflecting on life after the death of my mother.
Grief has presented me with a paradox. Looking at the calendar I realized that it has been four months since my mom has passed away. Until recently, whenever anyone would ask how long it has been since she died I would respond “two weeks.” This answer was instantaneous and honest, but not truthful. I’m only reminded of how long it has been when I’m confronted with deadlines. The paradox lies in the fact that while the months haven’t felt like they’ve passed, the hours of the day race by.
So I asked myself; for how long during a day do I feel alive? I’m not sure from where in my mind the answer came, but it came quick. Of the twenty-four hours in a day, I feel like I live only four. That means that for every six days the world experiences, I live one. For every month the world experiences, I live five days. The past four months for the world have been a mere twenty-days for me. Just six days longer than the two weeks I’ve been citing in response to people’s questions. If this is the timeframe by which grief operates, no wonder the chaos thrust upon us by losing the ones we love lasts until we ourselves die.
My mother died on October 17th 2012, from what I can remember she died just after noon. A nurse called me into the Palliative Care ward at about 6 A.M. She told me that I should head over because my mother was beginning to feel cold. For the ten or so days that she had been in the ward, I was with her every day. I feel that in some way the time I spent with her then in part prepared me for the end. Shortly after noon I watched my mom take her last laboured breath. I saw the pained expression on her face as her heart struggled to beat again. It failed and instead lightly fluttered. I remember staring in disbelief at my mom’s body and letting go of her hand seconds before the tears rushed in.
I’m grateful to have had those last days with my mom, but they weren’t easy. After almost two months at St. Michael’s Hospital she found out that she had cancer and though she didn't notice, had it for years. She broke the news to me over the phone and the only response I could muster was an apology. I told her I was sorry that something like this had to happen to her. She told me that she wasn’t worried about what the doctor said. She said that she had lived a long life and that doctors didn’t know everything. I don’t expect that she thought they were wrong. I began to cry on the phone she told me not to, and told me instead to be happy and that she loved me. I told her that I was going to visit her the next morning and she seemed surprised. I’m a bit puzzled that she sounded so surprised, of course I was going to come see her. Looking back, I wish I had spent more time with her before she moved to Palliative Care. I would stop by at least every other day but I would not stay long. She was always happy to see me, and I her. Both of us thought that things would return to normal. That she would come back home, take some new heart medication, and live to be a hundred. That’s why my visits were so brief, I never thought that these were the final days of her life.
I would soon come to realize just what I had lost by not spending those days with her. It hurts to think of her being there for so long, lying alone and sometimes in pain throughout the nights. I hope that she wasn’t lonely, I hope that she didn’t feel abandoned or unloved. She always had a smile on her face when I visited. She would boast to everyone that I was her son, adopted at the age of one. She would ceaselessly mention that I was in school studying philosophy. I would get embarrassed but now I’m starting to realize that she was proud of me.
The night that she moved into the Palliative Care ward she seemed happy. She was happy that there would be no more tests and no more blood work. All this news came in the middle of her trying to regain the strength necessary for her to come home. The physical therapy was hard, but she was trying. It’s cruel that in the midst of that effort she got such terrible news. I wonder if she understood that moving into this new ward meant that she would never be coming home. Before I left that night, in classic Trexie style, she told me to hand her her purse so that she could give me some money for food. It didn’t matter that I told her I didn’t need it, it never did.
I left her that night and the ten or so days after that are a blur. I have a hard time distinguishing one from another, but the next day the staff had told me that she had gotten anxious during the night. I wish I knew what was going through her mind. She had a lot of visitors from our apartment building and I stayed with her during the day. It was a hard thing to do. I would sit beside her bed and hold her hand. I would squeeze so tightly that our hands were covered in sweat. When her food came I would try to help her eat it, but it became increasingly difficult for her to swallow and she eventually stopped eating altogether. She also stopped drinking water. I eventually resorted to keeping her mouth moist by coaxing her to bite down on a wet sponge. She would sleep most of the day and sometimes say only a few words.
The days blur together. I remember that on one of the days I was crying beside her bed. She woke up, looked at me and told me not to, and to be happy… just as she did over the phone. She fell quickly back to sleep and I continued to cry.
During these days, I knew that I had to tell her the things I’d regret not saying. I always told her that I loved her, but there were things I could never bring myself to say. Even knowing that I didn’t have long to say these things, it was still so hard to do. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I do remember being glad that I said what I need to. If I was glad, it must have been because I told her that without her, I do not know where I would be. I must have thanked her for adopting me so late in her life and for loving me so much. I must have thanked her for going without so that I never had to, for teaching me about life, and keeping me safe for all these years. She was an over-protective parent to be sure but I was once told something I will never forget: if Trexie was guilty of anything, it was loving me too much.
There was certainly some sort of barrier to saying these things. It carried the same feeling of admitting that you were wrong. It had the same kind of shock to my pride. Let me be clear, it’s not that I didn’t want to say these things or that they were untrue. I suspect some of the impact found in trying to say these things is there precisely because the things are true.
You are also supposed to tell the person that it is okay for them to die. At least, this is what I’ve read. Some people may undergo unnecessary suffering by trying to prolong their lives because they feel as if they can’t go. This was the most sorrowful thing I’ve ever had to do. As the days went on, my mom began to lose lucidity, sleeping more and waking less. Sometimes, towards the end, she would wake for a few seconds and look around the room. It was strange though, it didn’t appear as if her eyes focused on anything as she looked around. It was akin to the way a newborn seems to scan his or her surroundings. As I held her hand tight, I leaned in to kiss her forehead (something I regrettably only started doing as she was dying). I finally had enough strength to tell her that if she needed to go, that if she felt her time was finally at an end, that she could go wherever she felt she needed to. I told her that I would miss her very, very much and would never ever forget her. I thanked her for raising me so well and told her I would find a way to be okay. I still don’t know if this is the whole truth. I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay with not having her around.
I am angry that it took me so long to tell her how important she was to me. She always said, “Bring me flowers while I’m alive, don’t wait ‘till I’m dead.” I hope I brought her enough. Enough to know how deeply I love and appreciate her. She deserved to know these things over the past twenty-four years and I only ensured that she knew them for her last ten days. For this I will always be sorry.
Though we lived together for so long, we didn’t talk a lot. I think the age gap, along with my own stubbornness, caused us to remain silent a lot of the time. I spent the average day on my computer, at school, or out with my girlfriend. She for the most part stayed in her room, listening to Q107 on the radio and watching the security camera channel on her TV. I did ask if she wanted to spend more time in the living room, but she always said she was fine where she was. She made efforts to talk to me but I think I made talking difficult. When I heard her speaking from her room, it would be hard to make out what she said through the walls and through my headphones. Sometimes I wouldn’t bother to take them off to hear her clearly. Other times taking them off and putting them on again was frustrating, so I would tell her that I was doing homework so that she would stop talking. How could I have been so selfish? I didn’t stop to think that maybe she was lonely. I’m glad that she had friends to speak with over the phone because I wasn’t always the best person to live with. I don’t know why I didn’t just take off my headphones, go into her room, and listen to her. She always had time for me, when and why did I start being or pretending to be too busy for her? Sometimes she would ask me to go out to get her food and I would complain or get upset at how frequently she asked. There are things I made more difficult than I should have, at a time in her life where I should have tried to be as helpful to her as she was to me.
I know it is common for people to express regrets after a loved one dies. I’m reminded of a quotation my mom had posted in the kitchen which I just only today took down. “Knowing the right thing to do is easy, the hard part is doing it.” I don’t know why it was so hard to do the right thing, or why in some cases I did not even try.
Now that I am living alone, I realize that a large part of companionship is non-verbal. I speak to my mom perhaps more now than I did most days when she was alive, but I still feel alone. It has taken this for me to realize that it isn’t speaking, smiling, or even laughing that makes companionship so great. They can add to the greatness, but they aren’t necessary. The greatness of companionship comes from the other person simply being there. Even if mom and I said only a few words to each other on a given day, I know now how much she contributed to my life by lying in her room and tapping her foot to the music from her radio. I know how much she enriched my life by greeting me when I got home, or by calling me only to say that she loved me and wanted to see how I was doing. I took these things for granted while she was alive. I took for granted just how tied-up my sense of well-being was in being so profoundly loved by another person. I doubt I have any personal quality which cannot have its development traced back to her. If I should ever attain moral, personal, or professional greatness, I will have done so because an amazing woman hoisted me atop her shoulders and held me in place with love.
It is hard now to recall memories from before the last week I spent with her. Nevertheless, there is one in particular which I will forever look upon with fondness. Two days before she died, and the last day on which she was lucid, I arrived in the morning to find her sleeping. I sat next to her and took hold of her hand. She awoke and scanned around the room as she had done before, but this time she was able to look right at me. She squeezed my hand and said “I’m glad you’re here.” That was the last thing my mother would ever say to me.
I don’t really know how to end this particular entry, some hope-filled passage seems appropriate but I’m too sad for hope.
I wrote this over a year ago. I have since found room in my heart for optimism, though it resides alongside grief. While time moves slower for me, it has not stopped and that gives me hope.
