Something I’ve noticed with time in my grief journey is that I have a stronger ability to say “no thanks, not right now” to my grief when it tries to sneak up on me. For example, sometimes when I’m driving, I have a moment where I remember Mom is TRULY gone and never coming back. I can feel my body starting to remember the moments of her death, and I can sometimes turn it off because I’m driving, or out in public, or whatever.
Yesterday, I ate a grapefruit. It is one of my favourite fruits, and it was a juicy, delicious one. But as I ate it, I remembered my mom reading over the paperwork of one of the clinical trial medicines she was hopefully going to try to prolong her life with. I remember she experienced a wave of grief for never being able to have a grapefruit ever again. I told her I’d go out and buy her one right then so she could enjoy it, and in the grand scheme of things, not eating grapefruit is a pretty small price to pay. She obviously agreed, and continued reading.
Unfortunately, not eating grapefruit was the least of Mom’s concerns because the tumours in her lung grew so quickly night after night that she was hospitalized and then died a few days later.
I can honestly say I rarely ever thought about death before Mom died, but I’ve thought about it many, many times since. And I know that I don’t get to choose the way that I’ll die one day, but I can certainly hope that it isn’t with lung cancer.
My mom died quickly after she was diagnosed, and I distinctly remember people telling me that it’s better that she went quickly instead of prolonging her suffering. I could have punched them in the face at the time… easily. But despite wanting to punch them, I didn’t want Mom suffering anymore than she already had because it was soul-crushing and heart-wrenching to watch someone you love so deeply suffer in this kind of way.
The day mom was hospitalized, she was struggling to breathe so badly. I wanted to take her to the hospital days before, but Mom knew she wouldn’t be eligible anymore for the life-prolonging experimental clinical trial medicine. So she pushed it. She was SO tough, and she persevered through struggling to breathe with an oxygen machine cranked.
But on that last day before Mom finally agreed for an ambulance to come take her to the hospital, I sat there holding the nose tubing of the oxygen tank in her nose. Adjusting it for her and holding it so that she got as much as possible. She was too weak to even lift her hands to move it.
In the moment, I was just doing what I needed to do. The adrenaline was pumping because I needed to do what I could to keep my mom alive.
But it was so so so awful witnessing someone you love gasp for air. And no matter what she did, she couldn’t get any more. Her lung capacity was taken up by giant tumours. And day by day they got bigger, leaving her less room for oxygen to enter.
Four and a half years later, I don’t relive those moments every day anymore most of the time, when the grief shows up, I can gently tell it, “not right now.”
Yesterday it didn’t. There are memories from those days that I wish I could erase forever. Watching her fight for every breath is one of them.
I still love grapefruit, but I will probably think about Mom as I eat them for a long time, and that’s ok.
I miss you, Mom.
Comments
Post a Comment