I haven’t written a blog, apparently in a while. I sometimes get stumped as to what I want to write about. Frequently, I’ll have thoughts that I want to share desperately, but don’t because I guess some thoughts are better left as such.
I toil between contentment and utter disarray. Truth be told, it’s nothing short of mania. Once upon a time, there was a chaos in my head that should have been diagnosed as bi-polar disorder. I’m not entirely confident I am past such conflict. For whatever reason, I’ll happen upon a moment that triggers deep seeded emotional distress and I’m left to sort through it and gain some sort of functional composure.
Today is the first day of June. I loathe this month. As May comes to an end, I’m left almost daily, with a level of anxiety that is daunting. I can’t honestly tell when I’m going to be ok when I’m on the cusp of total emotional break down. I’ve written publicly and privately about my lack of ability to cry. With this much time under my belt without that release, I’m left to believe it’s not going to change. No matter how much I long for a good hard cry, I’ve built up such a resistance to such vulnerability I have no idea how to crumble.
Last night my dad asked me how I’m doing this week. I basically said it’s a mix of anxiety and feeling just fine. As we talked about the anniversary of my mother’s passing coming this Friday, I realized something I hand’t truly articulated. Being the oldest in a large family, I’ve placed myself in a position of support for my younger siblings. I believe that role has somewhat inhibited my own grief. This isn’t entirely new to my comprehension, but there’s something about saying things aloud that makes it a revelation of truth.
I said, “How can I be a rock for those who need me, without a solid foundation under my own feet?” It makes so sense to me to open myself up to others to lean on, if I, myself, is standing on quicksand. I can’t tell you specifically how many times I’ve cried since my mother died. I vividly remember how awful the tears ran in the first several days. But the sincere breakdown I feel I need to gain some kind of closure has not occurred. I knew before she passed I was going to have to help my family. No one assigned me this task, but I just felt like I needed to be the one to provide the shoulder, the ear, the Kleenex, to whomever required it.
The times I have wept over my mother has had nothing to do with me and my personal loss. The times I’ve wept have been sadness for my youngest siblings who have been left to finish out the remaining years of their youth without a mother. For the life of me, I cannot imagine the tremendous void they are going to feel for the rest of their lives. How different would my teenage years have been without the presence of my mother? It’s impossible for me to fathom. In attempting to feel that for them, my eyes collect wet stuff and my heart sinks to the lower regions of my body and I physically ache for them.
I have several moments throughout my week where I want to pick up the phone and tell my mother about the funny thing Alex did that day. I look at my teenage daughter and see the elements of my DNA and want to tell her how funny it is to literally see myself in her. As Isabelle grows up and comes into the age of parental turmoil, I want to hear what she did to cope with me when I was adding to her grey hair. I could go on and on talking about the things I want to say to her, and the things I want to hear from her.
I am dumbfounded at the speed in which the past year has travelled. It’s incredible how quickly time goes as we get older. As I think about this past year and moving into another June, I’m also at a loss for words acknowledging three years have nearly gone by since I held my sweet Connor.
Life’s full of unfair bullshit. There’s no rhyme or reason to some of the experiences we’re left to endure. Insert cliche of getting through the hard times here:
I’ve also written publicly about the intertwining grief with my mother and Connor. I’m not sure if I wrote down the specifics of how they’re connected without the obvious dates. So, if you’ve already read this, feel free to skip down past it.
The last time I had my mother to myself was when I was hospitalized with pre-term labor with Connor. I had been helicoptered to TMC in Tucson and put on an indefinite bed rest. We needed Connor to stay in the womb at least six weeks before he’d be strong enough to sustain life. My mother got on a plane and came to my side.
It was almost exactly one week the doctors were able to medically prevent full on labor. My uterus refused to cooperate any longer and on the 9th of June 2008, I gave birth to a 1 pound 6 ounce baby boy. It was in the middle of the night. My mother was staying at friend’s house about 10 minutes from the hospital without a cell phone. Josh and I decided to quietly cope with the dire situation alone. I called my father and my best friend and that was it. My mom would be coming to the hospital as soon as visiting hours permitted and we would let her know then.
When she did get to the hospital, I hand’t slept in over 24 hours. I was moved to a new room (postpartum) and she came to me there. The sadness in her eyes was equal to none other’s than perhaps my own. I had gone to see my baby boy. I warned her of the difficulty of seeing him. She insisted on meeting her grandson. We went to the NICU together. My body aching from entirely too many drugs. I held her hand to keep her steady as we made our way.
For 11 days I watched my son fight for the life he’d been given. My mother was with me as much as I wanted her to be. Her body was deceiving her. She didn’t get enough sleep to support the emotional crutch she was being for me and Josh. The day Connor died was a day I’ll never forget.
The doctor’s explained the situation to me in as much comprehensible detail I could handle. I demanded explicit candor. The place we had reached with Connor was horrific. He was on morphine. He had a leg that no longer received circulation and was basically to the point of amputation. Edema has morphed his body into an unrecognizable state. Over the night, prior to this meeting, he’d received another IV into his head because the edema made it impossible to locate a viable vein anywhere else on his body. The doctors were certain, without an MRI, he had bleeding in the brain. He had received a lot of blood via transfusion. No matter what they gave him intravenously, it all was leaking into his body and increasing the amount of fluid in his body. His kidneys were failing. He was septic. In order to get his O2 stats to a good place, they had to put him on a ventilator that sounded like an air compressor.
Tears wouldn’t stop streaming down my face as I heard the specifics. The doctor told me and Josh that we had a decision to make. They could surgically fix the suspected brain bleed. But because of the state of his body, the likelihood of surviving such a procedure was slim. The doctor basically told us, there wasn’t a doctor who would be willing to do it. My mother sat on the couch with us and listened as her daughter was placed in such a predicament.
There was a level of depression shared amongst the three of us that was palpable. How in the world do you decide to end the life of a child? Well, that’s exactly what we were faced with. I talked to Josh privately about what we should do. Neither of us wanted to walk away from the hospital with a single element of avoidable regret or blame. We needed to be 100% on the same page with the choices we were about to make. Through sobs and incoherent talk, I said I wanted a final MRI. Even though we’d been told it was pretty much a guarantee we’d find brain bleeds, I guess I needed that positive proof he wasn’t going to make it.
We told the doctor we wanted the tangible evidence and they obliged our request. I told my mother what was happening. I explained the process we were staging in order to make our final decision. She looked at me, held my hand, put her hands on my head and stroked my hair away from my face.
Within 30 minutes the doctors came with the discovery of the MRI. Not only did Connor have one brain bleed, he had four. The MRI was his death sentence. We told the doctors it was time. He was suffering every second and it wasn’t fair. The doctors presented us with the opportunity to hold him without all the cables and wires hooked up to him. I insisted on that. There was no way I could hold a dead baby. We were given privacy as they set our plans in motion. My mother wanted to hold him too. I regret it now, but we kept those very brief moments of life to Josh and I. She waited outside of the NICU as we held our weak son until the last signs of life escaped him.
My mother assisted in washing Connor with Josh to prepare him for the morgue. I couldn’t do it. I went outside of the hospital and cried uncontrollably by myself. Now what? I went back inside just in time to see him one last time. He was bundled tightly with a knit cap on his swollen head. Despite my heart’s desire to let him lay there untouched, I picked up his lifeless body, kissed his head, and apologized for having been so screwed. It took us what seemed like an eternity to leave the NICU. We had no idea what to do now.
The weeks that followed that are somewhat blurry. A lot of crying. A lot of a anger. I wasn’t me. I took out my irritations and overall attitude on the easiest target. My mother. She didn’t know what to say to me. She didn’t know what to do for me. I wasn’t helping by being a significant asshole. She couldn’t do anything right and I made life in those four weeks after his death hell on her too. I wanted her to leave. I wanted her to stay. I wanted to go back to work. I wanted to die. The ultimate level of unpredictability was left to Josh and my mother to cope with. Everything about those weeks was hell.
It wasn’t until several months later that I owned the poor behavior I subjected to my mother to. It was about 7 months later I was brought into the light as to the severity of my mother’s MS. When I saw her again, she was suffering from extreme tremors that didn’t permit her to do anything alone. She was so unsteady on her feet at that point, she had fallen down the stairs several times. Her mind was deteriorating. She was losing her ability to filter appropriate comments from inappropriate. In front of all of us, she was becoming less and less Mom.
The last time I had my mother all to myself, I wasn’t me. The last time I had my mother all to myself, I was selfish and lacked empathy to her own pain and situation. She had done exactly what she could to support me and I was unappreciative to the point of malicious. I was impatient to her handicaps and mean. There is so much I regret about the way I treated her. By the time I realized how awful I was, she was incapable of understanding or even remembering what I was talking about.
I am certain she’s aware of my remorse at this point. When I went to her bedside and watched as the life she was left with was weakening, I wasn’t prepared. I told her I loved her and as I heard Alex in the background, I told her who was there. She wasn’t. But the rest of us were. I looked at her blue hands and cold skin. I wept as the reality slowly sank in. Within what feels like minutes, she was gone. My sister said she was perfect now. I thought to myself, she’s with my sweet Connor.
On Connor’s birthday, we gathered as family and remembered my mother. That, on paper, solidly connected the two of them together for me forever.
