The Final Shift
A Prelude to Eternal Life
Five years ago today, right around this time of the day, I was making my preparations to hit the road to South Carolina. I’d made a number of journeys down there that summer and over the previous year, but this one, I knew, would likely be the last one that included seeing my mom.
She had just been moved from her home into the Hospice Home, after having taken a serious turn for the worse earlier in that Labor Day weekend. Brother Jim had alerted the rest of us about it, his wife Dorothy being the one currently on shift down there with her.
It’s a funny thing, you know they say that as you live so will you die. Both of my parents, Jim and Rosemary, spent a good quarter century or so of their lives concerned with manning shifts on a hot line that saved people’s lives. Rosemary coordinated the filling of the shifts, as well as manning many shifts herself, while Jim often took shifts, as well as helped Rosemary to train the volunteers who manned the shifts.
The hotline was called Ala-Call, a statewide hotline that assisted people with problems related to alcoholism, helping them to find what would most help them in their current state of crisis, the first of its kind in the U.S., and a part of Contact609, a broader crisis hotline for the state of New Jersey. Mom ran that hotline for 27 years.
When Jim (Dad) was dying, Mom was still working full-time at the hotline, while Dad was in a hospital bed in their living room in Cherry Hill, N.J. While they had Home Hospice set up for Dad, with hospice nurses coming in periodically, Dad took a turn for the worst, and there was talk of possibly moving him into a Hospice House.
Even though brother Ken had come in to stay with them, along with Aunt Mary Lou, they’d been there for quite awhile, and both were close to the point of burn-out. I got up there when I could, mainly on weekends and a couple nights a week, but I was in the middle of a major reorganization at work, and couldn’t be there all the time, either.
There were many volunteers at Contact, as well as members of their church community, that were more than willing to help out, but Mom couldn’t manage having her house flooded with people coming to see Dad, so I set up a shift schedule, and sent out a call for volunteers to come spend a couple of hours with Dad at a time, around the clock.
There was never a problem filling a shift slot — the only problem was making sure there weren’t too many coming at any given time. Dad was never left alone during his final month, and never had to be moved into a Hospice House. He was carried to his final moments with the love of many who had known and loved him through his life. They came in on their shifts, and loved him to death.
With Mom, brother Chris, who lived down the road from her, during the fall, winter and early spring, was doing most of the heavy lifting as she began going down her self-described “downhill slide”. That March, a number of ailments began to emerge, seemingly all at once, signaling that Mom’s health was in serious crisis.
Sister Mary spent the better part of April into May down there with her, helping Chris out. There was talk of moving her from Independent Living into Assisted Living, but Chris and Mary saw the look on her face when they showed her the AL facility, so a call went out to us siblings.
There were seven of us, and our significant others, perhaps we could take shifts coming down there and helping out, staying in Mom’s spare room so someone would always be there with her, as she took her final slide.
And that’s what we did. She was able to stay in her two bedroom apartment right up to the very end, when she got moved into the Hospice Home for her last few days.
I was on shift for most of the month of July, while brother Jim and his wife Dorothy were covering most of August, between them. Kathy and I got down to spend a weekend with them, when we got Mom to the beach that last time, ten days before she died.
Sister Juli was scheduled to come in by the second week of September. But, the call went out that Mom was being moved into the Hospice Home, and I decided to get down there as soon as I could. It was Labor Day, September 3rd, 2012. I encountered no traffic at all, all the way down, unheard of on a Labor Day on I-95. But, I made it in 8 hours flat.
Entering her room around 9:00 in the evening, I initially thought I’d arrived too late. Laying there in her bed, she looked not unlike Dad had looked after he’d passed, and my father-in-law had looked when I’d arrived just a couple minutes too late to be with him before he passed.
But, as I got closer to her, I could hear her labored breathing, and breathed a sigh of relief myself that I’d made it in time. I wanted to be with her, for as long as this final shift took.
A nurse came in with her medication, but seeing she was still sleeping, left it with me, saying I could wait until she awoke to give it to her. I was happy to do that. In a little while, her eyes opened, and she looked over at me with a recognition. She was no longer able to talk, and beyond the recognition, I wasn’t sure if she really even knew who I was.
So, I just started talking, and she held me with her gaze, telling me she was following what I was saying. When I said, “Hey, Mom, once you feel better, maybe tomorrow or the next day, maybe we could go back down to the beach”, I knew she was hearing what I was saying. She gave me that patented Rosemary Egan look that seemed to say, “What are you, nuts? Don’t you see what’s going on here — I’m dying, you idiot!” But, I might add, the look was given with a sparkle of love in those Egan eyes, that she always reserved for me, even when I was being an idiot. Her eyes always gave her away.
I laughed and said, “Just kidding, Mom.” It took a while to get the medicine down, as she could barely swallow. She kept signaling that she wanted water, but could not manage to hold the water in her mouth long enough to swallow it. Then I remembered that Dad had loved ice chips in his final days, so I got the nurse to bring some ice chips, and that was just what she was needing. She beamed while I fed her ice chips, and a communication of pure love went on between us for what felt like hours, but was probably but 20 minutes or so.
She began to do something with her hands, and at first, I couldn’t tell what she was doing, but she kept looking at me, then at her hands, then back at me. She was trying to tell me something. I finally got it — I think. She was holding her hands together like the praying hands that had always sat upon one of her bedroom dressers, along with her Prayer of St. Francis. Those items had shown up there when she first got sober, 48 years earlier, when I was 9. I’d never really understood what all the AA business was about, but I learned that prayer early on, and always saw those praying hands, and knew they meant a lot to Mom.
That prayer, and the concept of prayer, had helped me to get sober myself, 35 years before. So, it only made sense that she wanted me to pray with her. I recited the prayer of St. Francis, as best I could from memory, then she gave a little smile and closed her eyes, going back to sleep.
I slept in a chair in the corner of her room, being lulled to sleep by her deep, heavy breaths. When I awoke in the morning, she was still breathing deeply, only I noticed increasing pauses between each breath. I, again, remembered that Dad did that in his last few days. Instead of running out to my car to get my shower kit to take a shower in her little bathroom, I was compelled to go sit beside her bed, and held her hand. That’s what I was doing when she took that final breath in, but never let it back out.
I got to be there as Mom was born into eternal life. I swore I could feel her spirit leave her body, then suddenly felt all alone in that room. I rang the nurse’s station, and they came in to confirm what I already knew. She was gone.
That was all five years ago. I trust that she is still very much alive, in her eternal life. But, God, how I miss her in this one. She was the most amazing Mom I could ever have hoped for.
