A busy couple of months
Wow. October already. I have no idea if anyone actually visits this website, but if you do, you may have noticed that it hasn’t been updated since July. It has been a heck of a couple of months.
At the end of July, I flew up to spend a week with my 91 year old mother. We had a nice couple of days, and then after an evening working on a jigsaw puzzle – she fell. It was about 11pm. I was headed out the door and only caught it out of the corner of my eye. She was next to the card table where we’d been working on an image of a phoenix. She turned and somehow her feet didn’t turn and she just went down. She knew immediately. She was groaning in pain but said, “This is bad. This is real bad.”
The paramedics arrived in 20 minutes or so. The hospital in the nearby city was easily forty minutes away. I drove and sat in the waiting room for an hour before a security guard took pity on me and let me go back and wait with her and the paramedics in the hallway while waiting for a room. It was a long wait. I think she got a room around 2am. It was rough as she was in incredible pain. They did a cat scan and her wrist and seven rib bones were broken – two in two places. The surgeon told me that for every broken rib at her age, there was an increased 10% chance of fatal complications. I told her this. She nodded… she kind of knew that this was the end. We sat in the dark emergency room and I stroked her hair back from her forehead… sometimes we’d speak… much of the time I just held her hand and made sure she knew I was there. She got a room in the ICU around 5am, and I headed back to my guest room in the senior community where she lived. I stopped at a Denny’s en route and had breakfast. It was strange to know that this was it. At 91, you know in the abstract that death is on the horizon. But when it actually arrives, it is a bit surreal.
My mom lasted through the weekend. My brother, and a couple of my nieces and their spouses stopped by. She really appreciated that. She was doped up for the pain but still was pretty clear. There was a point where it looked like she might make it, so my brother was surprised when he got the call at 6:20am on Monday that she was going into cardiac arrest. She was more than ready to go. She had told us many times that she is ready to go. Her body and mind had been failing for a while. So… I’m at peace with her passing. It was rough in the moment, in the emergency room… her in pain. That was hard to see. She was always a kind woman. We may not have seen eye to eye on everything, but she was truly a good person. I’m not really wired to fall apart, so I didn’t. But lots of complicated feelings of course. I still regularly think of things to tell her… adventures that I think she’d enjoy hearing about. But, she’s gone.
I canceled my flight home. I spent the next couple of weeks emptying her densely packed 1100 sq ft apartment. Generations of things. Wonderful vintage things mixed with empty jam jars… so much stuff. Nieces and their spouses and friends came into help on some days. My brother was in the midst of a move of his own, but he was able to come in at the end and helped a lot. But it was rough. The weather was warm for Washington and long days led to me getting increasingly dehydrated. My brother and I met with an attorney to discuss practical matters. I began planning my mom’s celebration of life at her long time church. I’ve known the folks at their church for quite a few years. My sister was active there and her family. My atheist father’s service was there after he died. I spoke at my sister’s funeral there… one of their first events in their new sanctuary (it is sort of a mega-church). It is always a little awkward, as they know I’m a heathen… but I’m polite and they are polite… we worked through the details.
Late in August, I rented a Dodge Durango and filled it with those things I wanted to take home with me. A good friend flew north to keep me company on the two day drive home (on my own it would have been three to four day drive). I very much appreciated it as I was exhausted and dehydrated. We had a nice evening in Ashland at a favorite restaurant and an excellent bit of theater. Those two days were a bright spot. I got home. I unpacked. I felt crappy and went to the hospital.
I was diagnosed with Covid. So with Covid I finished up the twelve page program of photos and stories about my mom, coordinated the printing of it in the small town where my parents lived. I edited together a ten minute slide show about my mom’s life. The service apparently went well. I couldn’t go due to Covid, but in all honesty I had said goodbye during the time I was up there – at the hospital and in clearing out all the objects from her home. I didn’t have the energy to return so soon. Paxlovid knocked out the Covid relatively quickly. But I had a bit of a cold that hung on afterwards. There were a couple Wholesome Queer events in early September that I was sufficiently recovered to attend. I find I valued that community even more after the month I’d had.
Since January, I’d been organizing a trip to France, Belgium, and the UK, and three friends offered to come with me. We were slated to leave Sept 16th. We were all flying separately and meeting in Paris. There is a puppetry festival every September in Charleville-Mézières. We spent two days there and saw some wonderful puppetry. And we also explored Belgium – which is pretty fantastic. The image up top is of Waterloo. At the tail end of the two weeks, we spent a few nights in London.
And now I’m home again. It’s been an intense couple of months. Full of highs and lows. I do feel a little changed. Still processing everything. I can say that it has impressed me with how important it is to live one’s life. To enjoy it and seek opportunity for new experiences. None of us know how long we’ll have. That isn’t a morbid thing, it’s simply reality.
We have the choice to choose what our life is about every day. How will we look at the upcoming day? What will we choose to remember once the day is finished?
