Actually, that’s not true.
She died more than a week ago, but titling this “My mom died one week and one day ago” seemed too precise, and in ways that feel unexplainable and murky, my mom does die everyday, over and over.
When I was 26, I lost the love of my life on a dark road. He was walking home—home to his own mother—after working the door at a local bar, a job he did some nights after he finished as a mechanic at one of the dealerships.
“It’s been awhile since I’ve stayed with my mom,” he told me as I got into my car to go home after we’d had dinner together. I made him promise he wouldn’t walk, he agreed, and then I kissed him goodnight and left him, standing there, hurrying to get home because I wasn’t feeling well.
I get a lot of calls from 800 numbers that are spam so when I looked at my phone that night I let it go. A couple of minutes later I noticed a voicemail. The transcription was something about my parents medical alert system and how my dad had called because he couldn’t get my mother awake.
I started to pace. Always a bad sign.
My dad’s hearing is bad, and truth be told I wasn’t ready to hear what I knew he was going to tell me, so I dialed her number instead even when I knew the chances of anyone picking up were slim.
I messaged her friend and let her know my mom was having a medical emergency. Can you go over there and see what’s going on? “On my way,” she wrote back to me in an instant.
Next, my brother, who was driving his daughter to college. When he answered he thought I was his wife who he’d been spoofing, trying to make her believe he’d seen Snoop Dogg in a restaurant. “Mom’s had a medical emergency,” I told him. “I can’t get in touch with Dad but Cindy’s on her way.” He would try dad, he said, and call me back.
The details came from a Sheriff and an EMT who’d responded to the call: She’d been down for 20 minutes without a pulse. They shocked her twice and administered four shots of epinephrine.
“I’m sorry, Shellie,” my brother said when he called back. “She’s gone.”
Kurt’s dad woke me from a dead sleep. When I picked up the phone, my voice was still froggy and thick. “I’ve got some really bad news,” he blurted out, probably unsure he would be able to finish if he waited. “Kurt was killed.”
The part of my brain that processes incoming information slammed shut, unwilling to let those words have meaning, letting them sit outside, useless and undefined. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” I screamed back at him.
“I have to call my mom,” I said, hanging up.
“She’s still with us,” Cindy exhaled, and everything I’d been holding back and pacing away across my floor came rushing to the front of my mouth. “Really?” I sobbed.
She was, in that moment, the sickest person in the hospital, the ER doctors said, but they’d intubated and sedated her and were going to transfer her to ICU.
When I summed up for the doctor what I thought I’d heard him tell me, he agreed I’d understood: “There were some positive signs that suggested she might make a recovery, in some way. There were a lot of critical signs that suggested she would not survive. The next 24 hours were going to be critical.”
“She’s alive!” I shouted to my son in Vermont, who’d been at the library when I first called to tell him his Nanny was in trouble. He’d muted himself so he could be sick in the bathroom.
My mom was in the room when I gave birth to my son. Watched as they delivered him to this world, poked him under the lamps and cuffed him with a bracelet that said he was mine.
“He’s beautiful,” she said with true wonder, as though seeing something otherworldly for the very first time. Their hearts instantly knitted together.
“She’s alive?”
I immediately tempered the expectation infused in that word: “She’s very, very sick,” I added. “She’s was down for 20 minutes without a pulse. She is still critically, critically ill and may still die.”
The guy who hit Kurt left him in the road, turning back toward home to get his son. He’d been drinking, or that was the assumption.
A nurse who saw Kurt stopped and called an ambulance.
“When they put us in the small consultation room, I knew it was bad,” his sister told me later.
Doctors said he died instantly. His neck had been broken.
When I first saw my mom laying there, intubated, a ventilator doing some of the work of breathing, I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.
My dad was in a wheelchair at her side, stroking her arm. I put my hand lightly on his shoulder, “Dad,” I said, bending down to give him a hug.
“Oh,” he exhaled over and over.
Out in the waiting room, my mom’s friend grabbed me, my aunt and uncle enclosing me in a hug, everyone shocked into near complete silence. A short while later with my dad falling asleep in his wheelchair, I went back to be with my mother.
Finally, alone, I laid my hand on her forehead. “Hey pretty lady,” I whispered. “Looks like you just got your hair done. You went a little shorter and spicier with the color. I love it.”
I bent over and kissed her cheek and told her that I loved her over and over and over.
Two days of peaks and troughs — hope and heartache —were followed by three doctors visiting with the same definitive and devastating news: She had sustained a massive and irreversible brain injury.
The pulmonologist was the last to leave, telling my brother and I that he would write orders such that nurses could access as much morphine as needed. They wanted to slow her respiration so when they removed the ventilator her breathing wouldn’t quicken too much, and they wanted to help with any anxiety.
As the ICU nurse explained what would happen, I asked, as I asked every nurse who’d provided care to my mother, if she’d always wanted to be an ICU nurse. She was the only one over the two days my mom was there who’d answered “Yes.”
“Have you ever seen ‘Dying for Sex?’” I asked her. When she said “No,” I told her she might enjoy it, that one scene in the series stuck with me and came to mind as she was walking us through my mother’s death.
“There’s a hospice nurse who tells those caring for the young main character who is terminally ill that ‘the body knows how to die,’” I described. “I thought that was such a beautiful way of talking about the process.”
She agreed on both counts.
My mom needed loads of morphine to get her respiration down far enough to remove the ventilator. Everyone in the room had a chuckle about how this woman who didn’t drink was now high as a kite. “She is flying,” the nurse confirmed.
When the ventilator was removed, my dad and brother and I stayed next to her bed, my son on the phone. She shepherded him into life and he would usher her into death.
I rubbed her forehead, tears traveling down my face and dripping onto her neck, a continuous stream of love and gratitude and sorrow and promises poured into her as her breath rattled and rattled and rattled and, finally, stopped.
Years ago, I had a friend who was traveling abroad. We kept in touch via email. During one of our exchanges, he answered one of my questions with “same, same but different.”
That’s how loss feels to me: Same, same but different.
The loss of my mom feels familiar in ways. The deep pit in my chest as I tried to work out for myself that my mother no longer exists. The catching myself thinking of something I have to tell her. The wondering if in some other plane of existence she is alive, well, either saved or never sick.
All of those and more I’ve felt before. Same, same but different.
What never changes is that loss follows what I’ve found to be life’s larger pattern: A study in opposites, an ask for all who make her acquaintance to test their ability to hold what feels contradictory together.