Death

My father called me on a Saturday morning uncertain of what to do.  My mom was exhibiting much more serious symptoms of a stroke.  When I spoke with her on the phone, she was essentially incoherent. I told my father to call an ambulance and that I would be up from my home in Towson shortly.  As I raced up the interstate (I managed to get to the emergency room shortly after the ambulance, even though I was easily four times as distant to the hospital), I could not hold back wave after wave of profound sadness.

My mom’s stroke that morning was not her first.  She had, in fact, been to the hospital about a month prior, been treated and had been subsequently released, seemingly on the mend. But I was not prepared for her to be facing a second stroke so soon.  It was clear that something more serious was wrong. When I arrived and walked into the room where she was, I broke down again in tears, though she showed both the patience of Buddha and also managed to make a joke while waiting for the ER doc to make a diagnosis and determine what could be done.

I learned later that my mom had had a recurrence of a nightmare the evening before.  Periodically she dreamed of the angel of death standing at the foot of her bed.  These dreams had occurred at various other times near when another family member had died, such as around the times that her brother-in-law had died.  However, in those other nightmares, the angel of death did not look at her directly.  The evening prior was different as it had looked right into her eyes.  Going into the hospital that morning, she knew it was likely her end.

That end came in eight days, after numerous tests to attempt to rule out other possibilities, a trip packed up in an ambulance from the local hospital down to the specialists at University of Maryland, and a third stroke that ultimately would be her undoing.

The morning of the Sunday that she died, I was at her bedside.  Even though the nurse monitoring her told us that her higher brain functions by that point had likely stopped, I think that she was crying. I held her hand, crying myself and telling her that she need not tarry here for us and that it was ok to go where she needed to. Though she had borne her end with much dignity and some humor, I think it broke her heart to leave behind the people she loved so much and would not see again in this life.

That afternoon, my father called me to tell me that the hospital had called and that she died. We went down and stood there for a bit in her room, next to the shell that was her body. It was jarring to be there with her knowing that she had died, when only a few hours before she had been alive.

We buried mom a month later in a graveyard in Western Maryland in Grantsville.  I don’t remember very much about that intervening month.  I know that I met with clients, went to work, and did the things that I had done before my mom’s passing, but I frankly forget the details.  I do remember that in the days after she died, a song by Adele would come on the radio and I could not help but cry, though the song had nothing to do with the loss that I was grieving.

We had decided to have a graveside service for mom. Ironically, this would have been a job for her, as she was the family member with a master’s of divinity and had actual experience pastoring to others.  But mom did not leave any instructions or directions.  I reached out to one of her friends who also was a minister, Douglas Fox, and he agreed to lead the service. In the intervening period, I wrote a eulogy to help remember her life, which I read with the wind to my back beside her grave marker. I had barely slept the evening before and could not eat I was so full of emotional turmoil at the prospect of this service. But as it turned out, it was my father that was more upset than me at mom’s loss. It was I that held onto him to comfort him in his grief that afternoon after he could not contain his emotion any longer at the injustice of his loss.

Since that time I have not tarried long at her grave marker, though the last visit there was more peaceful.  I noticed also that the plot my father had bought for her originally stood alone when she was buried, but has since filled in on both sides.