Five. Part one.

A gentle wave of sadness comes over me at certain times during the year. It catches me by surprise even though it's not all that unexpected, in May, at the holidays, and in January.  It has been nearly 5 years since my mom passed away. It feels both like a long time and a very short time. So much has happened since then.  There is surely not a day that goes by that I don't think of her or share something about her with my kids. I miss her, terribly, but it doesn't hurt as badly now as it did five, four, three, two, one year ago. I can remember her more easily with smiles and happiness.  January is the hardest, though. The details of the last weeks, days, breaths of my mom's life are forever ingrained in my memory, my being.  Though I can observe them now, and mostly let them pass, whereas before these memories were pure torture. They are a part of who I am and how I interact with the world. They don't define me, but they are a key part of my story. And so I have decided to write a few blog posts about my mom over the next week. I feel like it will be really nice to  unload some of the annoying baggage I have been carrying around  so I can remember her more easily as she was most of her life not just at the end.  Sharing makes it lighter.

 And so for part one, I complain.

 I have always wanted to write a letter of complaint to the DMC chaplain staff about the 'fast food drive thru' last rites service my mom received by the most insensitive and ridiculous chaplain who, afterward, was waiting for the elevator at the ICU  and said to me as I passed by,  "You could die waiting for these elevators." Yes, YES, he said this. And his annoying face is one I'd like to forget or at least punch but for now I will just scream on my blog, WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? ARE YOU SO DESENSITIZED AND DISCONNECTED THAT YOU REALLY JUST SAID THESE ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS WORDS TO ME?

I can laugh about it now that I complained publicly. Sheesh, that took me 5 years.

Or how about the very nice nurse who cared for my mom in the last hours and who I hugged and who cried with us, who so sweetly brought us pop cans while we were all sitting around my mom's bed holding hands when it was just her, no equipment or drugs, breathing shallowly her last breaths.
POP CANS people. I half expected the air popper to be brought in next.

What a rush this is to vent a little.

Ok, one more, and this is definitely something to write more on, but how about the Dr. who portrayed the surgery, that preceded my mom's even quicker decline, as no big deal. I am pretty sure somewhere in that week we were at the hospital someone should have said, "We might want to think about hospice care." Because that would have been a much kinder end of life experience for my mom, for us all, but we got swallowed up in the hospital system and we were blinded by sadness and confusion and what felt like rapid decision making and then lots of waiting and lack of sleep and so we probably didn't ask the right questions or advocate for our mom or ourselves "the right way". Ugh. We did our best. Maybe someone did say it and we just couldn't hear them.

I can hear my mom laughing right now. I can see her smiling face which is so beautiful and so very refreshing.  I am very much like her, mulling over things, hanging on to things, wanting things to be just right. But I will post this even though it's not perfect. It's cathartic. It's just what I need.