The clock on my phone says 3:12 am. The only sounds in the apartment are the snores of our exhausted family as they take their turn catching up on sleep, the concentrated oxygen machine, which has a low rumble like a clothes dryer, followed by what reminds me of the air brakes on a semi truck, and the tower fan cooling the living room. Seems strange to write the words “living room” when this is literally the room in which my mother in law is dying.
Tonight is my turn on the night watch, and really that is all I’m doing, watching. At this stage in her cancer she doesn’t need anything from me, aside from the occasional oxycodone we were instructed by hospice to squirt into her mouth every four hours, keeping her sedated and comfortable. Truth is I’m mostly watching for when she takes her last breath, and so I watch and I count. Sometimes she takes five or six rapid, though shallow and labored breaths, other times she goes as long as a minute before taking a somewhat violent, heaving gasp. It’s been like this for three days. We don’t know when it will end.
It’s strange how a room can be so familiar and so foreign at the same time. Everything seems to be a two edged sword. The furniture that has occupied her home for years is still here, though now it is rearranged to make room for and share space with the hospital bed and other medical equipment that populate the area. These things are welcomed for their utility and yet they are foreign and make us uncomfortable because we know why they are here. The digital picture frame running on a continuous loop supplies precious memories, but it also pixelates our pain with a montage of people long gone. Every twenty-two minutes it takes us on a journey from when she was a child, to a mother, to a grandmother, to a cancer patient, and every time it ends the same. It always brings us back here to this room with these sounds and this reality. It’s late August but we have a cloth Christmas tree on the wall and stockings above the fireplace. We put those things up today because she loves Christmas and this is going to be her last Christmas. There’s no mountain of presents under a tree that is too big for this little apartment, no baked ham, and no special dip or cheeseball. This is a silent night, but there is no joy or peace here tonight.
The worst part is knowing this isn’t the worst part. Seeing her like this, a woman who has always been defined by her strength, lying helpless and weak, is painful, but at least we can still see her, speak to her, touch her. We are literally hours from her being gone. She’s 61 years old, she has been a mother for 43 years, and I’ve known her for 26 years, but in just hours she will be taken from us for the rest of our lives. We’ve had our last conversation, and it was a good one, maybe our best one, but still it was our last one.
I wrote these words a few hours before my mother in law Debbie departed for what Hamlet called "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns." Today is the third anniversary of our life without her and I decided I would publish this in honor of her. I wrote this on my phone as I sat by her bedside and it is incomplete, ending abruptly, because it was interrupted by the final stages of her life. I chose to leave it unfinished because that best describes our time with her, it is unfinished, the rest is yet to come.
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