My Mother’s Last Breath

This is the first day of the rest of my life without my mother

The room is empty. Yesterday, it was full. Caregivers, hospice nurses, family members bustled in and out, creating the chaos and stir that goes with life.

My mother still breathed and groaned and sipped Ensure through the straw I held to her cracked lips. My hands caressed her mottled, sunken cheeks. My lips brushed her forehead.

Today she is gone. This is the first day of my life without my mother.

I tiptoe to the bedroom, listening for her labored, rattled breathing; ready to ask one more time, Can I get you anything, Mama?

But her room is empty, the narrow hospital bed sterile and neat; no longer filled with the tangle and messiness that marked her last days.

I plunged into that messiness of diapers and blood and chaos, trying to be tender when only brute force could accomplish what needed to be done. No wonder she hated the turning, pulling, shoving, heaving that came with changing and cleaning an independent woman.

Tenderness came later, when she was washed and cleaned and comfortable and I could murmur, Love you Mom.

Dying is not pretty.

Life drips like water through your fingers, impossible to grasp, sliding away until you don’t know when that last soft breath slipped from the parted mouth, because you could swear you saw the eyes flutter, the chest rise, one more time. Only you didn’t.

There were graces

She lived with me for the last 20 months of her life, this woman who died just four days short of her 102nd birthday. Those 20 months were a hardship and a gift.

Do all great gifts come with hardship? Are challenges a prerequisite for blessings, fine-tuning and enlarging us until we are ready to receive what God has in store?

Yet at every step, grace defined and softened the journey.

The week I planned a trip, she took a turn for the worse. “Don’t let her die while I’m gone,” I prayed. And she didn’t. I was back home five days before she died.

My brother was coming for her birthday. I called him, and he came early. Our mother got to see her son one last time. Small graces.

I never had to use the morphine that hospice provided. She wasn’t in pain.

Caregivers and hospice workers, a brigade of angels, proved kindness and compassion still exist. Through the dross of everyday caregiving, they sparkled like gems, restoring my faith in the decency of people.

On the day of her death, my mother gagged and choked, vomiting the Ensure she had sipped earlier. I prayed, Lord, take her before she suffers.

The caregiver and I cleaned vomit, changed her again, slipped the wet gown over her head, dressed her in a dry one. We changed her linens, replaced her pillowcase, and I repositioned her so that her head rested on the pillow. A trick I’ve learned is how to change sheets when someone is still in bed.

Then the pallor of death, like a curtain, stole over the flush of life that had been there seconds before. And just like that, my mother was gone.

Today is the first day of life without my mother

I have been thinking a lot about last times, and how we can’t recognize them. I didn’t know, when my mother shuffled off to bed one evening in April, that this would be the last time she ever walked.

I didn’t realize, four months ago when we stopped at the Chick fil A drive-through window, that this would be our last time buying her favorite nuggets and Coke.

How could I know, last spring when we drove away from the lake, that she would never be there again?

If I had realized the last time she gripped my hand that this would be the last time those fingers twined through mine, would I have ever let go; eased my fingers loose so I could do something important?

But we can’t know about last times. We can only cherish the moments that make up our days, holding them close and allowing them to enlarge and enrich us.

Sometimes they are not good moments, and we decide whether to move forward in bitterness and anger or forgiveness and love.

What we decide in these moments sets a course for the rest of our lives.

I worried that my last memories of my mother would be damaged by these last 20 months; her dementia and her helplessness. But already those memories are a sepia photograph, fading as other memories emerge. This, too, is a small grace.

But the greatest grace is that I was able to have her with me and take care of her.

The day before she died, I hopped in the hospital bed and read to her from her precious Bible. She had not been able to read it herself for a couple of years. She coughed so much I wasn’t sure she heard me read, but the caregiver heard. She said, “I’m glad you read that Bible story. It comforted me.”

I am comforted now knowing my mother is with God, in a part of the universe that exists without pain and suffering. She is reunited with those who have gone before, and where we will all go some day.

I no longer need to hop in the hospital bed and read to her, because she no longer needs her Bible. Now, instead of looking through a glass darkly, she sees face to face.

“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12, NIV Bible