Grief and the pandemic

Maria

May 2020

The fact is that I thought about starting this blog a few weeks before she died. I was even tempted to call it “Dying Would Be the Easy Part”.

She and I would write together about the really hard conversations we were having, about how to arrange care for her as she got sicker, and about her last wishes. And maybe writing together would open up the even more difficult stuff we weren’t talking about, beyond just the logistics and legalisms, about how hard it was on both of us for her to become more dependent, and about the fact that goodbye might be right around the corner. About the fact that for my whole life, her mortality had been the one subject I hoped never to address, and here it was.

She was quite sick, but we didn’t know what it was. She was really anemic and needed blood transfusions. She’d hated doctors her whole life – I mean HATED them. And suddenly she had become an old lady who spent all of her time going to the doctors or talking about going to the doctors. She hated that, too. And the anemia comprised her cognitive abilities. She had been smart and capable her whole life, and now she was getting forgetful. Her sense of direction got even worse than usual, and the baseline had been alarming as it was. And I was supposed to do something to solve that, too.

We kind of both knew that she was dying. She was trying to mask how sick she was because she really didn’t want to talk about it. Because, how horrible and scary! And because if she got much sicker, she wouldn’t be able to live alone anymore.

Theoretically, my partner and I were “ready” to have her live with us, except the house was nowhere near ready, like the fact that it has 4 stairs at the entrance, which suddenly, obviously, she couldn’t do.

And there was only so much time I could take off of work to take her to the doctor. I had already spent a week with her in the hospital. Thank goodness I had already taken that week off – it was just a cancelled vacation. I was in the middle of a huge project for work. A project I barely remember now.

At one appointment she’d wanted me to come to, the doctor told her that she might have leukemia, and if it was an aggressive kind, she might only have months to live. When she told me, looking up at me, I hugged her and said to her, “I’m so sorry, mom. That’s really scary.”

That weekend, we talked about Thanksgiving – then a month away – and what she wanted to do for it. She was clearly exhausted by the idea of traveling anywhere. But she said to me, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” And I said to her, “It might be your last Thanksgiving, so you get to decide.” And we agreed we would bring food to her apartment, and I would try to convince my sister to come.

On Monday, I took her to the hospital for testing and observation. On Tuesday she was diagnosed with leukemia. On Wednesday she was taken to the ICU, and that night I was asked to overrule the order not to put her on a ventilator. It hit me like a ton of bricks, but after talking with my sister, I confidently refused, having had all those hard conversations with mom. On Thursday, we moved her to hospice care, and on Friday night she died.  

Right after she died, all I wanted to talk about was the experience of that past week: what the doctors and nurses said and did; all the phone calls and conversations I had; what I was there for and what I missed. How I got good at adjusting the hospital bed, TV remote, the nurse call button. How hospital time passes so much more slowly and peacefully than normal life time. About the night I hardly slept next to her bed holding her hand. How amazing the ICU nurses and doctors were, and how much it meant to me that they were so supportive of the hospice decision that they all hugged us.

Gradually, I moved on to other stages of grief. I sorted through her things, listened to her music, read her writings, hung some pictures. I cried at least once a day for 3 months. And some nights, lying in bed, I would still replay the events of that gut-wrenching week. I realized what a traumatic experience it had been. Trauma was the right word. I had been traumatized.

Now in the midst of a global pandemic, when death, and hospitals, and ICUs are all over the news, it’s all fresh again, 6 months later. And it tears my heart out, thinking of families that can’t be in the hospitals with their loved ones. That the ICU is full to overflowing, running out to ventilators and the drugs to knock patients out so they can tolerate being on ventilators. That the nurses and doctors are so much more stressed out, getting sick themselves, not able to minister to the patients and families in the ways that they demonstrated to me was their calling in life. I think of all the trauma everyone in those hospitals is bearing now.

I’m grateful that for now, doing my part means time at home, the time to look inward, the time to read more of my mom’s writing. I’m even grateful that we’ve had to delay burying her ashes. It means that for now, she is here with me, at home, on the mantle.