Dear Reader: We are so pleased to present an excerpt from MotheringintheMiddle.com contributor Lora Freeman Williams’ newly published book:
When Isaac is five weeks old, my mother dies. She has just turned 65.
My home phone rings while I’m taking a nap with the baby. It awakens me, and I decide to let it ring. When my cell begins to ring next, I realize that it is the hospital trying my second number. The nurse tells me Mom’s oxygen levels are dropping, the end near.
I cry hard for a few minutes. I’m thinking I can’t do this alone. I need help. So I call a friend, and Karen picks us up a short time later.
When we arrive, I see my mother is gasping for breath, and I feel like the little girl I once was, in big trouble. It’s like times she wanted me to fix things that were far beyond my ability to fix. The nurse tells this is what the body does as “part of the process.” She also tells me that Mom can still hear.
I go into her room, holding Isaac.
“We’re here, Mom. We love you.” I stroke her hair, and I see her eyes flicker. Her focus passes quickly, and she says nothing.
She always said she wanted no intervention should she fall ill. Before the paperwork containing my mother’s living will arrived, tests eliminated the possibilities of a stroke or cardiac disease, but then testing stopped, according to her wishes. It may have been a lung tumor, her doctor said, but her care has shifted focus to palliative care. I sit with her in the quiet of her room and struggle to accept that I can’t fix her now, never could.
“We’re still here, Mom.”
I hope that she can still hear me.
“I want to tell you a few things.
“I want you to know how much I love you, Mom, and I always will.”
I find that I know what I need to say just as I need to say it because I am a mother now, too.
“I want to thank you for being my mother.”
My father, Frank, was a blind date, and they’d shared a bottle of wine and a fun evening. My mother never told him about me. She considered both abortion and adoption as ways to cope with being a single mother in 1968. She made the final decision when she held me in her arms for the first time. She couldn’t make the call that would have brought the lawyer to pick me up.
“I want to thank you for all the hard work you did to raise me. I know it was hard for you, and I know you did everything you could. I want you to know I forgive you.”
I wish now that the pain of being in her presence had not kept me from being with her so much of my adult life.
“Please forgive me. I haven’t always known how to be with you. But I love you so much. I will hold you in my love as you go. Isaac and I will be here with you.”
A single tear slips out of the corner of her eye. It is the only indication I have that she has heard me.
It is almost two in the morning when the machines begin to sound their alarms that her vital signs are dropping. The nurse comes in and tells me that my mother won’t last long like this, and I should say what I need to say now.
All I want is to reassure her now.
“Mom, Isaac and I love you. We’re here, and we’ll be here until the end.”
I pray the prayers aloud she would want to hear.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”
I get through one “Our Father” and three “Hail Marys” when the alarm goes off again to indicate her breathing has stopped.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”
I watch her and wonder at the strangeness of it, watching her stillness, wondering against all logic if she will again begin breathing and moving, as she has done for every day of my 37 years.
“…Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…”
It seems fitting to pray, as a mother, to the Mother, for my own mother now. Having so recently given birth, I am struck by the circularity of now becoming midwife to my mother’s passing.
“Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Lora Freeman Williams, 45, is a writer and life coach in Boulder, Colorado. She just published The Wilderness of Motherhood: A Memoir of Hope and Healing – her first book. She is also a contributor to The Zen of Midlife Mothering. Lora can be found @ http://www.wildernessofmotherhood.com. For more information and to purchase the book: http://www.amazon.com/