And now. . .

Mom was readmitted to the hospital yesterday, taken from Rehab, which for the last week has been more housing than therapy, back across town to where she had the emergency surgery for her spinal stenosis on Tuesday, July 24th.  Her pain was unbearable by the Saturday before, which so happened to be the 9th anniversary of my father’s death, although I have no evidence that she consciously remembered this.  Since then, she has been to two of the three hospitals that he was in during his final ordeal.

By last night, through a series of MRI’s, she was on a morphine drip for a slipped disc, for which they have decided no additional surgery, and the plan as I understand it is for her to go back to Quillen Rehab for another try at therapy, this time with a different pain relief cocktail.

I am not calm about this.  I want to be.  I want to just let it go, let it go, let it go, create spaciousness around it and be nonreactive.  However, it makes me crazy.  I feel wild.  Underneath this calm exterior, I am screaming.  And, at this point, I’m not even sure why; not sure I can articulate it.

Except.

Here she is, in this body that is deconstructing, one piece at a time, and I want somebody to do  something.  Since the beginning of this particular episode (where was the beginning?  What do we count as the beginning?) this has felt like a cascade, and that has proven to be the case, and it feels to me that it is accelerating, that there will be no relief, that we are headed diagonally and jaggedly South, that our lives, those of the people who love this woman,  are going to be ragged for quite some time, long or short, it doesn’t matter, it is going to feel like an agonizing eternity.

That is what happens in these cases.  Or at least that is my experience.  I remember going to the hospital day after day when my father was “in care” as they say in British novels.  I may have told you this but I remember driving to “Cow and Coffee” the little locally owned shop that I clung to as my home away from home, where I ordered my afternoon mocha and sat with my journal and my newly acquired Power of Now. I remember driving away from my father’s room where he lay silent on that ventilator, in a state of deep. . .something.  I would look out the driver’s side window at all those people going about their “regular” business.  And I would look in my own window at myself, and hear “there is a woman whose father is dying who is driving to coffee.”  Or when I would be eating lunch, “there is a woman whose father is dying who is chewing tomato,” and on and on.

The center of the Universe had collapsed to the black hole that was my father’s hospital room.  And now?  Now it has done it again, and is centered on my mother, as she oscillates back and forth between hospital rooms at Quillen and at Johnson City Memorial and back again, hooked to machines and to pharmaceutical concoctions, tended the best we know how by people who know her and people who don’t, in concert.

Her personality shifts, as do her pain levels, and we can’t see inside - really - to see if any curing is happening.  Meanwhile, her past disappears.  Any tentative hold she may have had on family memories evaporates with the drugs.  She can’t conceive of, much less hold on to any notion of the future and what that might hold if she can just muster up enough faith to get there; faith that there is a place where she might not be in pain, as she has been for years, where she could go on trips with her church, recognize and enjoy her children and grandchildren, walk down the few steps on her back deck to feed her birds.

Maybe this will change.  Maybe there will be the magical combination of drugs and clarity and a miraculous injection of oom-pah-pah that she will engage a gear that we are all desperately trying to set in place as a possibility.

It doesn’t feel like it right now.  It feels like she is on her way out, inexorably.  And maybe that is why I feel like a wet dishrag.  A screaming, wild wet dishrag.  I want to reach across that mountain and shake her and beg her to take hold.  And yet, there is part of my body that shares her deep, deep fatigue.

What is wrong with leaving? I have advocated it for years, for myself, electively.  I have said out loud to the consternation of dear ones nearby, “If there is any way to achieve it, I want to have the means to leave, early on, while I still have full faculties, when I have the intuition that my work is done.”

A common cry these days.  Like most who think about it at all, I don’t want this messy, incredibly expensive, technologically impeded, horrific departure.  It isn’t necessary.  It isn’t desirable.  It isn’t respectful. It isn’t moral.

I hope I’m wrong.  I hope that is not where we are.  But it feels like it.  It feels like we want emergence from this into a brighter future more than Mom does.  We have more energy than she does.  To us, in different encasements, not 89 years old, not having just had surgery, and now with a slipped disc, and not in that kind of pain and drugged and and and, the future inherently feels bigger, more hopeful, more real. The future here, I mean, embodied.

. . .Oh, my goodness.

. . .I just reread that paragraph. . .Maybe that's the answer.  Maybe that's what I need to let go of.

Maybe Mom wants emergence from this into a brighter future just like we do. . .

Maybe that is where I can rest.

We'll see. . .