Now you see it although at the time it was far from clear. I didn’t want to see that my mother was dying leaving this earth a little at a time. We didn’t have a diagnosis and it didn’t happen the way I thought it would the way I feared it would. Nothing catastrophic happened that left her debilitated and unable to walk or talk. I didn’t have to leave work or put her in hospice care. I guess I was the hospice care. She slept more practically all day sometimes but I put that off to her medications. She frequently was overmedicated or her medications interacted with one another or they just plain made her sleepy. She had difficulty breathing without oxygen even during the daytime when she didn’t usually use it. She was frequently nauseous or had the dry heaves which she commonly did due to her medicines or because she never really felt right after the gallbladder surgery even though she was supposed to. She still painted and colored and did the cross word puzzle and knitted. She even made gravy on Thanksgiving even though I was not feeling well or even up to cooking and eating at all.
But she kept losing weight and we couldn’t see why. She got smaller and smaller. The doctor said sometimes that just happened to older people..I guess they call it not thriving.
Still I should have seen it. Perhaps I would have worked harder to get to the bottom of it. But I was tired of taking her to doctors and really tired of all the invasive tests they would order up. In September we did a barium test to see how her digestive track was working. They said it would be about 45 minutes or it could take longer. There we sat in a cold room in the hospital gown and a blanket surrounded by radiology equipment waiting for that barium to wend its way through her body. 45 minutes, 1 hour, 2, 3, 4, etc. We were there all day. There was no place to lie down and I could see the toll it took on her.
In December they scheduled an endoscopy and a colonoscopy. But she never made it those tests. She entered the hospital before Christmas and underwent 3 days of X rays, and CT scans, and barium, and tubes, pumps, and prods before it wore her down and everything stopped working all at once and all of a sudden. It seemed sudden because it is never a good day for your mother to die and I wanted her to stay but really I should have seen it coming but I was too close to really see what was going on.
By Paul DeLong
On March 13, 2022
“It seemed sudden because it is never a good day for your mother to die and I wanted her to stay but really I should have seen it coming but I was too close to really see what was going on.” Your prose here mimics well how the reader imagines the experience was for you. The abruptness, the shock, the dissonance in cognitive processing that we all go through when we are overwhelmed by catastrophe. I liked this ending, as it put us inside the feelings of the narrator. Thank you.