They came and interrogated my mom’s pacemaker while she was in the ICU. They could pinpoint when her heart went into ventricular tachycardia, somewhere around 6:10 or so.
“She had a small run at 3:48,” the tech said. “Then one at 6:10 or so that was more than a minute long.”
Back in February, I was visiting when she fell over like a tree. I heard her as I came back in from walking my dog, though at the time assumed it was my dad. When I got up to my parents’ bedroom, she was conscious, but her voice was a forced whisper.
I called 911 and went back and forth between her and the window, checking in every minute or so, asking if she was still with me. “Yes,” was always her answer in a low moan.
She spent two nights in the ICU and another two in the cardiac unit.
At discharge, I was talking with a nurse who told me a heart can’t sustain a v-tach rhythm for more than 20 seconds or so. “Then, you go into cardiac arrest.”
After she died, my son told me he’d gotten a Facebook message from her that simply said “I didn’t send this!” She was talking about a previous message that was probably from my dad poking on his phone and sending things by accident.
Her message was sent at 6:05 p.m.
I sometimes wonder, suddenly and without any deep meaning attached, how close I am to dying.
Do you ever think about that?
Like, you’re sitting or driving or working or chatting with friends and, unbeknownst to you, you’re living the last 30 minutes of your entire life.
When my mom wrote that message to Ben, her heart might already have been in v-tach. During the earlier episodes, nurses in the ICU would come running in, alarms from my mom’s heart monitor blaring, only to find her sitting up relatively unfazed.
“You don’t feel that?” they’d ask her incredulously, looking at the wild rhythm on the screen. “You’re not lightheaded or dizzy?”
“No,” she’d answer.
I think about that now. The bottom chambers of her heart—bumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbum—on a rapid race to oblivion, sprinting to its own demise.
She was talking to the same friend I’d only minutes later ask for help when she arrested, not in a panic or pained gasp, but quietly.
“I heard your dad shout ‘Flowers, Flowers,’” she told me when she called from the ER, “but I thought he just needed her help and our call had dropped.”
I wonder if she’d been standing instead of sitting the v-tach rhythm might have been interrupted by a fall. I wonder if a pacemaker with a defibrillator would have saved her. I still type in the symptoms she was experiencing prior to the cardiac event, imagining the questions I’d encourage she ask her doctor.
I wonder about those minutes and seconds that were ordinary and mundane until they were anything but in an instant.
Death, swift and greedy.
Grief is unknotting the wonder and knowing what you can let go and what you need to resolve. My problem has always and forever been my resolve for resolve.
I know nothing will bring her back.
And yet, searching feels like clawing something away from death.
Maybe what I’m really hoping for is a way to make those last moments count for something more.