The Hospice Bed in the Living Room, The Oxygen Machine Nearby

3/22/21 -

Nearly three years ago, my mother was diagnosed with primary peritoneal carcinoma. It was a pretty harrowing moment for all of us in the family as there wasn't much of a history in the family of cancer. We didn't have a lot of experience dealing with it or handling it; it was a pretty foreign endeavor for us. 

That was July of 2018. I spent much of that month packing up my apartment so I could break my lease and move into her basement to help out around the house and be more readily available for her should something more serious arise. Luckily, those moments were few and far between, but we had a few feverish late nights that required several baseline hours of hospitalization. This was part of the deal and I understood what my being in the same house would require of me in this regard. It was one of the biggest, but also easiest, decisions I've ever made. 

Though true to form, mom didn't always need much help from me, incredibly self-sufficient woman that she was. I would sit with her through most of the weekly chemo appointments and then we'd roll through the Dairy Queen drive-through on the way home. Not only were the Blizzards a sense-memory from her childhood, they were also one of the foods that always tasted good to her (chemo has a way of completely ruining tastebuds). Though chemo days started out with anywhere from 4 to 8 hours of her being pumped full of chemicals, I made it a point to try and grab a ridiculous picture of the both of us. 

She hated this at first, being camera-shy due to the rapidly changing form of her body and not liking what she saw. But this quickly changed when she realized that I wasn't doing it to put her on the spot or make fun of her, but rather to help keep the rest of the family informed as to how things were going for her. Though she finally came around, you can clearly see that I began wearing on her nerves in later pictures (this is not true, but it's a funny bit of family nonsense to perpetuate regardless). 

And then, in late 2019, she kicked me out and told me to go find my own place. More because she felt that she had unfairly put some kind of burden on me (she had not) and that she was somehow holding me back from doing other things that I may have wanted to do (also not true). But I moved out of her house and into an apartment nearby that was right between her house and the hospital. 

But 2020 was an unkind year for a multitude of reasons. Not only did I need to keep my distance from her while she remained immunocompromised due to the chemo, I needed to keep myself far away from people who didn't take proper COVID precautions for her sake. This was due diligence on two fronts and it sucked, but it was necessary. 

Then came the tail-end of 2020. The first of several hospitalizations that have led us to this moment occurred right after Thanksgiving. The second right after Christmas. The third right after that. Each of them requiring lengthy hospital stays for differing reasons, though all were cancer-related in some way, shape, or form. These were tough days because while hospitals are great places of healing, they are also a place where many viruses and diseases exist. 

Fast forward a month and there are musings by my mother that she's thinking about stopping chemo because it doesn't seem to be doing anything more than making her feel worse for longer. Halting that would give her a little more time doing what she wanted with the last of her days. 

At the same time, she spoke to hospice care, who have installed a bed in the living room and an oxygen machine in the dining room with what looks to be a 60ft. cord allowing her to continue getting fresh O2 while walking through the entire house. The oxygen machine makes a sound like it's pumping out a small cloud every few seconds. It's a weird new normal as she needs to be on the oxygen constantly now. 

For a bit, she was moving around more, making her way from the bed to her recliner and then to her sewing area; as of this writing (Monday, 3/22), she is pretty much permanently in the bed, too weak to do much other than eat ice chips or drink a minuscule amount of water. She is weak, both from the disease having its way with her and because she's not eaten anything in over a week. My godmother has been a permanent fixture here at the house since early January and I don't know what we'd have done without her here. An old friend of my mother's from Oklahoma City (and retired ICU nurse), we couldn't have gotten luckier to have her presence.

I am fortunate to have had a good one-on-one with mom earlier this week when she was strong enough to be sitting up and speaking. I was unable to really say the things I wanted to her with any clarity in that moment, choosing instead to let her say all she wanted and needed. I wrote her a letter the next night, which she was thankfully able to read. I'm fortunate that we were both able to say the things to each other that needed saying before she is taken from us. 

There was a brief moment this weekend where the house was full of family and nurses, but I was somehow alone with mom in the living room. I took the moment to snap a quick picture of her, resting in the new hospital bed. It's not a picture I plan on sharing publicly, but it's one that I will remember because it's a brief moment of calm amongst so much chaos. 

***

4/25/21 - 

It's been a month since I started this journal entry. Mom passed away in the early morning hours of March 26th, just four days later. While the rest of my family was helping take care of hospice things and contacting other family members, I was stuck at my apartment waiting for the movers to come get all my stuff to be shoved into a storage unit. I would close on my first home 10 days later. 

My brother and sister and I went into "work" mode, following mom's wishes laid out in the three-ring binder she'd prepared that held all of her contact information for credit cards and utilities and lawyers and others she wanted notified of her passing. And then we were closing accounts. And then we were cleaning the house, readying it for family to arrive for the funeral. And then we were planning the funeral. And then we were having the funeral. And then we were her three kids, rummaging through an entire life's worth of stuff and things and remembrances and memories and tokens of fleeting moments that still held a little shine in her eyes for one reason or another. 

I closed on my own house, but I am currently working and living out of mom's while we continue to clean and organize and donate the things we simply cannot hold on to. My brother lives three hours away while my sister is twice that, though both return when they're able to help. 

It's a weird thing to go through an entire home where so little of your own physical past remains. It's strange to place importance upon the things that were important to someone else. Does holding on to these keepsakes, these little memorials of things that once were, make it easier or harder to deal with the passing of a loved one? I honestly don't know at this point; while I can't speak for my brother or sister (or any other family member for that matter), I've simply been too busy to really grieve. 

But when I look back on things, perhaps I am avoiding the grieving process by throwing myself into tackling one of life's problems before tackling the next and the next and the next, constantly avoiding the hard conversation I may have to have with myself at some point. Maybe throwing myself into work is actually a healthy coping mechanism, I don't know. That's a question best left to people smarter than me. 

I remember doing this when my father passed as well, going out to Phoenix to help that side of the family untangle the paperwork of his life. However, that was a finite amount of time that I could spend out there. After three weeks, I had to return home to keep getting mom to chemo. Jumping from life happenings to life happenings to life happenings, a constant string of events requiring immediate attention. 

So...living, basically. And on it goes with more life happenings to come and more to come after that. Maybe the best way to honor someone's memory is to keep living your life in the way that made them the proudest. 

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