Mom’s Last Page

She sat across from me in that room and we waited. We both knew each other better than to fill the silence with conversation. I felt slightly nauseous at what news would soon be delivered by, I assume, a well-bred doctor that gave this news to many families over the years. I was right. His kind eyes and straightforwardness were appreciated and seemed well practiced, which saddened me even further. My mom sat stoic and absorbed the words I knew she was expecting. After he left, we both looked at each other and understood there would be nothing more done here. No rounds of this or transfusions of that. She was done. She had been done years ago when my father passed. She had told me this numerous times since she we moved in together some 3 years back. What prompted all of this, was that my mom had begun to turn a kind of yellow color a few months back. She was becoming more and more tired, putting her head on the table after dinner to be woken up by me encouraging her to get to bed a half an hour later. She had MS since I was in 8th grade, making her around 40 then. She was 76 when she passed, it had nothing to do with her MS. Within a week of turning a sickly yellow, she was scanned and a biopsy concluded she had bile duct cancer. Who knew that was really a thing? I knew about pancreatic cancer and how that had a terrible end so I imagined this would be very similar. It was.

The doctor with the kind eyes and impeccable education told us what we already knew was coming. No surgical options at her age were viable. She did not want to live out the rest of her life in a nursing home recovering from an operation that was done in vane by an eager resident. She told him she was going to do nothing, which he readily accepted as our best option. He gave her 6-12 months to live and could not tell us exactly what was coming, but we knew it was not going to be good. He did tell us to contact hospice as they dealt with these exact things every day. Within one day or hearing the news, hospice contacted us and set up a day and time for the initial interview. My mother was irritated at all of their questions and prodding into her wishes. She was annoyed at their niceness and overall concern. She wanted silence and they made unwanted noise. She was a social worker her whole life, so their assessment was nothing new, just that she was on the other end and that annoyed her as well. She did not want their help or their pity. She fought against the pity role since her MS diagnosis years ago. We never helped her unless she asked for it. She would struggle but find accomplishment in doing things herself. We would watch her struggle with doors or lids to jars. We would stand by until she asked for help or risk annoying her with our best intentions. Sometimes even at the disapproving glance of an onlooker.

This time, she had no choice but to surrender and accept help that was not welcomed but necessary. She received my help with a humor I do not think I knew she possessed. We laughed as she swung by the Hoyer lift, me, bending her stiff legs into position over her wheelchair. We laughed as her head popped out, her hair wild and frizzy, from the only garment she wanted to wear anymore, the mock turtleneck. She had one in every color and pattern imaginable. Her daily wardrobe was the mock turtleneck and a blanket to cover her legs, “Why would I put on pants when I’m not leaving the house?” I realize now that those are words to live by. We laughed as we struggled to get on pants while she lay in her hospital bed. She soon disapproved of leaving the house for any reason, especially because she would have to put on pants. To say her last month or so would be enjoyable is unthinkable but probably true. We spent nearly everyday with our lives more intertwined than ever before and I think I grew to appreciate her more than I had before. She became tired, spending more time in her room sleeping than doing anything else. Her appetite waned and she noticeably lost weight. She lasted about 2 months.

Soon after her death, my sister and I were going through her things and ran across two well-worn small black notebooks she had kept around the years we were born. Their broken bindings and heavy pages with elegantly scripted feelings and expectations written in her own hand. I rubbed my fingers along the indentations of ink. There were pages half full as the day did not yield much to write about to other pages filled top to bottom with hurried script. I can see her hunched over the notebooks, smiling, writing so fast her hand cramped but she kept going before her thoughts took flight or life intruded. We also found, on the last page of each, bank account numbers. One for my sister and one for me. The last page wrote out instructions of money deposited for our futures and eventual needing money for houses or cars. I believe she forgot about these as no one, not my mom or dad, ever mentioned them to us. My sister and I sat in the middle of my mon’s room, with boxes of folded mock turtlenecks slated for the Goodwill around our feet, pondering the excitement of vast inheritance. We both knew it would not be easy trying to find bank accounts from branches that have changes ownership a few times over. However, we both knew that it meant having our mom close to us for just a little while longer. Over the next few weeks, we poured over the internet doing what felt like covert investigative journalism. It was exciting and frustrating. We would follow one lead that ended only to find another we had not traversed yet; it was like a game of hide and seek. Maybe my mom had not told us about the accounts on purpose, maybe she had forgotten. My sister and I would talk about what we would buy or spend it on when we found it. We were like kids again laughed like teenagers talking about clothes or vacations. I think it brought my sister and I closer, which may have been my mom’s plan all along. We did end up finding those accounts and the money we found we put in an account for our own children. A few months ago, I went out and bought two little black notebooks myself to write about my mom and finding our lost accounts. They are new, with pages yet to be filled with conversations I’ve had with myself over the years. They are waiting to be filled with ideas for their futures and hopes for my own. Maybe my children will find their accounts in the back of these notebooks when the time comes. Maybe they will find a way back to each other with my notebook’s help.