Goodbye Mama

We’ve called her “Ma” since we were in our teens, but today it seems she’s gone back to being Mama.

She was taken to hospice a few days ago, in end stage kidney failure. Our relationship over the past few years has been complicated, usually companionable but sometimes turbulent, and I had not talked to her for a while (she could no longer communicate well on the phone), and could not possibly go to visit her, many hours from where we live.

I had gone to bed that night, and it took me a while to fall asleep. It took me til nearly midnight to settle in. As I was drifting off, I had a thought.

“I wrote a story today, Ma. I learned what it means to spin straw into gold. It is flax. It is dried, and kinda rough like straw, but you treat it, then spin it and wax it, and if you do it right, it ends up golden colored and shiny. So you really can spin straw into gold.”

I heard a reply. Not with my ears, but more like an echo of my mother’s voice in my mind. “That’s JUST the kind of thing I love to learn!” She sounded really tired.

And then, “Laura, I’m afraid.”.

“It’s ok. It’s just a door. You’ll keep learning cool stuff, you just won’t hurt as much.”

And I went to sleep. I am comfortable with death, and I’d often felt my father, and my daughter as though their presence was near me, after their deaths. On some occasions, I’d had that feeling of hearing them in my mind. It was a comfort to me, to know they are still aware of the lives of their loved ones.

I woke a few hours later to go to the bathroom, and heard my mother in my mind again, “Laura?”

“Yes.”

“You gave me a gift! I’m ok! I’m not scared, I’m ok!” she sounded cheerful.

I went back to bed. In the morning we got the news that she had died in the night.

She loved to learn new skills, and had once learned to spin. I hope she really did hear what I tried to say. The one thing I am certain I learned from my mother is that if I need to learn to do something, I can.

Her body and mind were so crippled for the last several years that she really could not do that anymore.

It was several days before I realized I’m not even grieving her death. This is a hard thing to admit, since people get so nasty about it if you do, but my stages of grief over losing my mother were over long ago. She left years ago, and the person in the house with us just wasn’t her anymore, and wasn’t going to BE her anymore. She lived in her chair, and entire days would go by without her saying anything to anyone. She’d hold it together enough to be chatty with visitors, but even then she could no longer control her side of the conversation. Dementia robs you of the person day by day, and you grieve it out as it happens. By the time they are truly dead, they’ve been gone a long time already, and there’s nothing left to mourn.

Ma lived next door to us for about 11 years, and relied on us and our kids to help her out. I was the one of her children who saw the gradual breakdown of her capabilities and her capacity to reason and think things out. We moved away, and she would not go. When we met up with her again a few years later, her capacity had declined so much that she could no longer live alone. The last 4 years of sharing a home with her were tragic in so many ways, that her death has brought us only the sorrow that those years were so difficult, and so painful for both her, and us.

We did not have a funeral, there really wasn’t any point, since only a couple of people could get there. And I’m really ok with that, f I could afford to travel up for a funeral, I’d have done it when she was alive, when it mattered to her. I did not need to say goodbye to an empty body. She was already missed… and we are kind of used to that.

I hope she now has the chance to learn to spin straw into gold.