The hardest thing I've gone through was watching my mother die an excruciating death from colon cancer.
Mom lived for a year after she was diagnosed. I remember the 80 mile round trips everyday for radiation. I remember the helpless hope that the first round would get the malignant growth that her colonoscopy didn't. I remember the two week sessions in the hospital, with mom throwing up constantly and being too sick to eat. I remember her pain as time wore on and she began to get growths in her bones and liver as the ravaging pain spread.
I remember the last time I saw her lucent, she looked up at me from her hospital bed with her soft blue eyes and said we need to talk about what we're going to do with dad. I told her "Don't worry about that mom, we're going to take care of him," and I could see the visible relief on her face, as she let go of her great self-imposed responsiblity. Her deathbed, and she was still worried about others. . .Sometimes I still dream about the pain of heart as the water slowly rolled off my cheeks and I told her that I loved her. She squeezed my hand and replied in kind, then rolled over to rest from while the powerful morphine held her sickness at bay temporarily.
I remember her aching pain during the last months, how she'd cry in the middle of the night and take hot showers to try to ease the pain of the growths that were tearing her insides up. I remember how I hated myself for not getting her to get a colonoscopy a few years sooner--it would have saved her. She lived in a run-down trailer, a product of taking care of my permanently brain-injured dad, poor. The whole in the roof in the heater room would fill five gallon bucket fuls in five minutes whenever it rained.
I remember her last trip home from the hospital--out of her mind from the liver failure that signalled the end was near. Leading her to her bed with her wailing and delirious. Giving her morphine pills around the clock for 4 days, until her parched lips and tongue were too swollen to take anymore, and we got a liquid dropper. Seeing her get to the point a day later where even the liquid would not go down, and she was through talking. Bringing her grandkids in on the final night, and her grasping and hugging them, even though she couldn't talk. Trying to help her lay in a position where it didn't hurt so much, running out of those positions.
I'm still haunted by that night. I had been up for 3 days, exhausted I went to sleep. At 1:30 in the morning, brother's words awakening me with "Mom's dead." I awakened, and the power had gone out on that July night. There had been no storm the previous week, but as the power went off in the middle of the summer--something that rarely happens, the lights were out, and mom died, the thunder boomed and lighting tore, and the rain poored through the holes in the roof. Yes, mom was gone.
We were broke, the funeral home guy who came out cut cost by coming by himself. I didn't know if I could bear to see her carried out, yet I found myself harnessed with the task of rolling and lifting her onto the stretcher, and carrying her out to the truck. I had this horrible thought of dead animal carcusses in my head as I grasped my side of the sheet and lifted, and my knees were rubbery. I worked like a machine, as if I were separate from my conscious, no tears. But, as I watched the taillights fade away and felt the cool rain and thunder, I turned and walked to the bathroom, shutting the door. I cried as hard as I've ever cried in my life, unconsolable for 15 minutes. I kept hearing in my head her painful cry the day before to let her die, she was in such pain. I don't remember much else about that night.
I went to her funeral, and the jw's who kept coming up and saying "We'll see her again, it's only a little while" had no idea how their words tore at my heart, for I no longer believed. I stared at her lying in that casket, feeling guilty for all my inadequacies and mistakes, but I never shed a tear. No, my crying was over. I didn't shed a tear for a long time after that. I was dazed, like I'd had a big shot of novocain in my heart. But I'll always miss her.
