I've finished writing, with the help of Jonathan and Suzy, an obituary about my mom, and it will appear in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle as well as in the Contra Costa Times so if friends don't know about her death this past week, they'll know, and people who know me but don't know Mom will have a little bit of an idea about her. But really, obituaries are so inadequate! I think that's the way with resumes. Facts don't really sum us up. So today I want to write a little bit about what's been left out of the obituary.
I got a message from the nurse at Aegis on Saturday night that Mom had choked at dinner, been unable to breathe, lost her pulse, been resuscitated and taken to Emergency at John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek. Of course, I rushed out the door, but traffic was such that it took me 40 minutes to get to the Bay Bridge! It had taken the paramedics only four minutes to reach Mom after they were called, but there was no saving Mom even though there were “heroic measures.” We spent three days with a mother who was no longer there but was, instead, attached to far too many tubes—and this in spite of her Advance Health Care Directive stipulating that she not be kept alive artificially if there were no hope of recovery. I guess that there was hope of getting back brain activity with something called Hypothermia Therapy. They said some patients come out of it knowing the date and that Obama is president, which gave me fantasies of Mom’s getting back the brain activity she had before Alzheimer’s. But I also thought of how horrible it would be if she were “saved” but paralyzed and unable to do anything more than breathe.
While we were waiting for them to let us see Mom, my sister Suzy mentioned the play W;t. She had just seen the movie version with Emma Thompson as the brilliant professor of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets?
“And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.” The comma is supposed to mean that nothing but a breath (the comma) separates death from everlasting life.
John Donne is the one who wrote “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so.”
The professor is nothing like my mom, but she’s also facing her death. giving DNR orders, and she speaks directly to the audience at the beginning: “It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die at the end."
So I’ll tell you that last Wednesday I began the day at the side of the body of the wonderful woman who was my mother as she took her final breaths, finally—after three days—disconnected from all the tubes and the machines that were keeping her artificially alive without any brain activity. They did keep her attached to morphine, though. It was good to see her face without the tubes, but it didn’t seem to be her face at all. She looked like a little bird, fallen from the nest. Kathy and I were there to stroke her hair and tell her all the things we loved about her and were going to celebrate about her 90 years—just as if she could hear because you never know, and the hospital staff was wonderful about also speaking to Mom as if she were there and about working around us, encouraging us to be there instead of making us feel as if we were in the way. Nurses are among my heroes. While Mom was at Aegis, I would sometimes lie down beside her and cuddle with her, and a couple of times we even sang together--showtunes! She would join in. We got all the way through "You'll Never Walk Alone" from Carousel, and after we sang "Bali Hai" together, Mom said, "You know, if you gave that to me for my birthday, I think that would be my favorite present, but I wouldn't tell anybody that." Even with Alzheimer's Mom thought about hurting the feelings of other gift-givers. That's the kind of thing you can't put in an obituary. I went home that day and ordered the sheet music so Mom, still able to play the piano, could have it for the sing-along for her 90th birthday. Carousel arrived the day I came home on Wednesday. Anyway, once when we were cuddling, Mom said, "This is very comforting," and at the hospital I wanted to lie down with her, but the tubes got in the way. So did the body temperature in the Hypothermia Therapy they used.
After Mom had had 24 hours of the “chilling” part of hypothermia, which they began at 10:00 PM on Saturday, they started the warming on Sunday and got her back to a normal body temperature by Monday, but she didn’t say “October ten” or “President Obama.” She never responded at all except for little seizures—although at one point, when she was still attached to too many tubes, her eyes opened and her mouth trembled, and she really looks as if she were sobbing for a couple of minutes. The nurse gave her more Adivan. On Monday we waited all day for the hospitalist, the doctor who makes the rounds and is allowed to say more than the nurses are permitted to say. Of course, he came after Suzy left and Kathy had gone home to feed the dog. He told me, “It’s so sad, but…” and even though he continued his sentence, I already knew from his first words and from seeing Mom what the end would be. Yesterday I brought in the afghan my mom made for my 40th birthday so we could cover her with that for our last hours with her (body). The first hours of her “passing” went so slowly that Suzy called Jonathan to ask how long it might be, and Jonathan looked it up and said “from ten minutes to two and a half days, average.” So Suzy left with the idea that she would come back this morning after picking up some breakfast for Kathy and me. But it was at 12:45 a.m. that Mom stopped breathing, and 1:15 a.m. that the nurse disconnected the monitors showing her “progress.” So I called Suzy to let her know, and then I drove back to San Francisco, where contacted Jonathan, my sister Dana and her two sons by e-mail before collapsing.
I spent the next two days writing Mom’s obituary, and even though I feel sad that she didn’t make it to her 90th birthday and that her death from choking was such an awful way to go, my overwhelming feeling is one of love and admiration. I believe in the adage that "With a death, a life ends, but a relationship continues." And in a sense Mom's life hasn't really ended because of what she permanently left with us, and some of that is mentioned in the official obituary.
On Sunday Javier and I will see my brother David, and, sparing him the details that I'm not sparing you, I'll tell him about Mom, who often asked about him. He had asked about Mom, too, who after forty years of going to see him with me, could no longer go. We were waiting for her to get stable at Aegis, and then we were going to bring David in to see her on her birthday. That's something else that isn't in the obituary--her love and concern for David. I couldn't mention the funny, off-beat things she said, either. 'But, to paraphrase Tennyson a bit, "She is part of all that she has met."
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