Death of a Matriarch

My mother died. The loss is tremendous. I saw it coming and I didn’t. I was prepared for it and I wasn’t. How does one prepare for losing the person that gave them life? It is a lot like giving birth, it is almost impossible to describe the pain, but unlike birth, you don’t forget this pain, not ever.

Getting me out of a refugee camp in the-middle-of-nowhere, South Sudan was an epic feat. It took 5 flights to get me to my mother’s bedside. My relief was immense as I watched her lie there asleep in her hospital bed. Michigan was bitter cold compared to the 104° from which I came. I had all the wrong clothes but I didn’t care, I was just so glad to finally be there.

I bought a house just over a year ago within an hour drive of my mom. Acutely aware time with her was dwindling, although she was in good health, now in her 80’s, I knew she wouldn’t be here forever. Still, I hated the thought. Death was not a taboo subject with my mom and we talked a lot about it over the years and particularly in the last year. At one point I told her she wasn’t allowed to predecease me because I didn’t want to live without her. She just huffed. I didn’t really want to die before her because I didn’t want her to have to deal with the loss of yet another child but she also knew the work I do takes me to some dicey places and it wasn’t out of the question something could happen to me. I told her if it did, not to be sad for me because I was living the life I have always wanted and doing what I loved. We had a lot of conversations like these over the last year.

When I returned from Bangladesh last November, I was to go on another assignment to Mozambique within 6 weeks. Because of the pandemic, visas were delayed and I ended up not leaving until March. In retrospect, this was a blessing in disguise. I was to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and her birthday with my mom. We spent a lot of time together just the two of us at her house and mine. We did puzzles and watched too many true crime shows – she loved her “murder channels”, as she called them. We listened to Queen because she loved Freddie! We worked on tracing our ancestry, we reminisced, we pulled a few minor capers (my mom loved a good caper!), we got on each others nerves and we laughed – a LOT. My mother was hilarious.

I brought her flowers every week when I went to visit. It was a ritual I started after bringing them once and realizing how much joy they brought her. So I just started bringing flowers whenever I visited. She was rarely without fresh flowers. And when she came to my house, I made sure there were flowers there.

My mom did not want to be in a hospital or have any extraordinary measures taken at the end of her life – this I have known for years. We talked about it openly and matter of fact. Anyone that knew her knew this about her. She lived on her own terms and that is how she wanted to die. So the first order of business after getting her out of the acute crisis was to get her home.

Because I am no stranger to end of life experiences, I could tell from her symptoms that once we got her home, she only had a few days left with us. Also, she would not be one to linger, it wasn’t her style. One of the rare times I was actually able to be alone with her, I sat at her beside, we talked of lots of things, and secrets only we shared. We said what needed to be said. I told her how much I would miss her.

I was rather unnerved by my mother’s reaction to her current circumstance – kind of surprised – like she had of course expected one day to be in this place but not quite so soon. It made my heart hurt to see her in this turmoil, a place I suppose we all reach if we get the gift of confronting our own mortality at the end. Still, it was disquieting to watch my mother navigate these emotions but in the end, she departed this life just as she had lived it, with tenacity, humor, love, grace, and on her own terms.

The night before she was discharged home into hospice, my little niece and nephew snuck into the hospital via a side entrance, bypassing the COVID gestapo at the main entrance who only allow one person at a time to visit. Not only were my niece and nephew there, but my mom’s beloved Pomeranian, Echo was snuck in inside a reusable shopping bag – one last caper! It was worth the risk of getting in trouble just to see my mom’s reaction when she saw her dog. 

I am a caregiver by nature. It is who I am and it is also what I do. But one thing I was very clear about in my own mind was that I did not want to be my mother’s end-of-life caregiver. I did not want to think about medications or dosages, vital signs or what the hospice nurse had to say. None of it interested me in the least. I just wanted to be the daughter that was losing her mother. My job is taking care of people and I didn’t want my mom to be another job for me. I am no stranger to death. I deal with it on an almost daily basis in my work and I have been at the bedside of people I loved as they took their last breath. I don’t fear death at all – not my own mortality or that of anyone else. I simply didn’t want my mother to leave. I was dragged against my will, kicking and screaming into this loss. I wanted nothing to do with it. My mother was the person I had known the longest in my life and it was as if my body, on a cellular level remembered when we were one. It remembered when she was my world and I was newly born, tiny and helpless and all I wanted, like all newborns, was my mother because that is the way nature made it. I had my mother all to myself for 16 months before a sibling would come, so during that time, I was her world, too.

My loss was so profound, I didn’t want to talk to anyone, see anyone, hear platitudes or get condolences. I just wanted to be alone. At home, I slept for 18 hours, then 12 and 14 hours respectively the first days. I have fought depression on and off throughout my life, but this was nothing like that; this was a whole new level. I couldn’t bear to be on social media because I was afraid I would accidentally see her obituary and then that would mean she was really gone, so I deactivated my accounts. I still have not read her obituary.

I would like to say that I have good days and bad days, but I don’t. All of them are bad. I feel this loss like a huge rock crushing my chest most days. It is physically painful. This must be what a broken heart feels like. I remember telling my neighbor before I departed back to South Sudan, that I didn’t know how anyone lived through the loss of their mother because it was close to unbearable. But there were people walking around all over the planet who have lost their mothers and obviously they survived, which is quite literally the only way I knew I probably would as well.

Just prior to my departure back to the field, I reached out to a couple of my mother’s close friends because I knew they were also hurting. I knew there would be no platitudes, just sadness and grief. Her friend and neighbor that lived on the bay with her, sent me a beautiful photo she took of the sunset the day my mom died. It seemed an appropriate tribute from nature and the place she loved so well.

Now, more than a month out, I would like to say things have gotten better but they haven’t really. My sweet friend, Gabriella said, “grief is an interesting thing, you start to build a relationship with it”. I am finding that to be true. It is like the relationship a kidnapping victim has with their captor – you start to identify with it and there is point when Stockholm Syndrome sets in and the grief is just a part of you, it has taken root and you give in and go along with it and are forever changed.

I remember being with my mom when her mother died. I remembered her navigating that grief. I remember how she almost instantly turned into a helpless young girl right before my eyes, when my grandmother died. I know she missed her mother until the end of her life. I also know she survived and went on to thrive. So even as grief holds me hostage, my mother has given me a glimmer of hope to hold on to, her final gift to me.