My Mother's Last Stand

The doctor told my sister on Thursday night that if family wanted to come and see my mother before she died, now would be a good time. She had been asleep by then for 48 hours straight, fighting pneumonia and two other infections. By Friday morning, she was awake and able to recognize my sister and, later that night, she spoke, with difficulty, to my brother and another sister who had each traveled from different states to be by her side.

On Saturday morning, I thought she was coming out of this. Everyone now says she's not. She's dying.

It's difficult to understand why she's dying now. Over the last dozen years, she has starred in long-running series of personal medical dramas, starting with a Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA), a kind of temporary stroke that we noticed because the corner of her mouth started drooping one morning. By my wedding in 1999, she needed help going up steps, but was still able to dance with me.

Since then, it's been a long, steady decline in her physical capabilities slowed only by thorough doctoring and complicated Rx combinations. Since then, she's gone from cane to walker to wheelchair and back again. Since then, she's endured several stays in the hospital, has been in and out of physical therapy, on and off oxygen.

I worried about losing my mother for as long as I can remember. She used to drink to excess, buy cigarettes by the carton, avoid social interactions and exercise, and generously add butter and salt to almost anything she ate. Still, she's outlived her oldest son, one of her grandchildren, both her first and second husbands (the latter was my father), and my wife. She's had a tremendous will to live. I hope she still does.