Ungrief

Over the past year I can say I have been on an emotional roller coaster of emotions. My parents, my mother and my uncle (who was also my godfather), had been ill for a long time. Both my sister and I lived quite a distance away from them and due to family issues of our own and were only able to help our much younger nephew who lived with them with managing their care through phone calls and a constant open three-way text. Other than the information he relayed to us, we had no idea what was going on. I sent county workers out to their house but I was told that they couldn't help. My sister and I found out way too late we were being fed a huge web of lies.

Ten days before last Christmas, a few days after my uncle was released from the hospital diagnosed with pneumonia, he collapsed in their home alone right before my nephew arrived and died. I took over the situation over the phone speaking to the Sheriff on the scene as my nephew was in shock. I had my nephew taken from the house to the hospital to where my mother was (yes, they were actually both in at the same time this time, my mother was there for a second heart attack and she had advanced COPD). We told her the news through a three-way speaker phone family call. She was devastated. All of us were, we were a very small close unit even if my sister and I did live far away.

The hospital tried to discharge my mother and send her to a rehab and didn't ever address her heart issue, but her lungs were the real problem. I kept calling the hospital before her transfer, trying to protest and kept stressing to my nephew to keep fighting them as he was there. She was transferred anyway. Within a little more than 24 hours the rehab facility called an ambulance as my mother was having trouble breathing. While she was on her way back to the same hospital that discharged both my uncle and her too soon, I texted my nephew to call her insurance company to begin to get her transferred to a different hospital as soon as possible.

As he was doing this in the ER where she was, the same staff who had seen her before were infuriated with him. They didn't want her moved but the three of us agreed we did not want her there. The insurance approved the transfer and she was moved to a better hospital by the morning. We knew this other hospital well as our grandmother had retired from there many years before and my mother's heart doctor was there.

My mother stayed in their ER for a while as they assessed her and determined the unit she would go to and they had to wait for a room. She was in really critical condition but she was not being sent to the ICU as it was determined that she would be in need of long term care. She was sent to a unit with a private room and put on a BiPAP machine to help her breathe, essentially her lungs were no longer functioning on their own. Plans started being made for her to go live in a long term care facility as there was nothing more that could be done for her,

My sister and I got to speak to her for very brief amounts of time when she was off the BiPAP machine to eat. I got in touch with my other uncle, my mother's younger brother whom she hadn't spoken to for quite a few years after a falling out, to tell him of her condition. He was at the hospital as soon as he could get there and met my nephew and spent quite a long time with my mom.

Christmas came and went and my sister, nephew and I were in constant contact. Right before New Year's the insurance refused long term care. They said to call Hospice. We were devastated. Mom couldn't live without the BiPAP machine, it was breathing for her. She was sleeping most of the time and on a lot of pain medication. We tried to fight but it was no use. I spoke to mom's nurse but there was really nothing to do. The hospice worker had already come in and spoken to my mother.

I explained the situation to my sister and when I found out the details I called my uncle again and told him she was being transported by ambulance to Hospice. He went to the hospital and stayed with her until she was loaded into the ambulance for transport. My mother arrived at Hospice about 30 minutes later, greeted by her own nurse and escorted to a private little room/cabin with a bed, table, chair and a porch that she could sit outside on....a nice place to die I guess.

Mom ate and she was made as comfortable as she could be in bed without the machines of the hospital. My nephew was there with her, my sister and I each spoke to her very briefly. Then that afternoon the doctor, the same doctor who had seen my mother twenty years before and put her on Prozac (which sent her into a suicidal state that put her on disability), saw her and put her on pain meds. She could hear but stopped speaking as he was having a very difficult time breathing. I spoke to her nurse. There was nothing more that could be done but wait. It was agonizing for everyone.

My mother made it through the long night and my nephew stayed with her. He held he phone up to her ear so my sister and I could each tell her how much we loved her and say our final goodbye as she was finally laboring so hard to breathe and stay awake. She took her final breath on January 3rd, the day before my son's 8th birthday, whom she never got the opportunity to meet.

Within a few weeks, our small family experienced a tragedy over the holidays I never fathomed would happen to us. We were all three in shock, so far apart from each other. Christmas was bad enough after losing our uncle and my mom being back in the hospital and trying to hold it together for my children who happen to be special needs, but then having to put on a birthday party the day after my mom passed for my son pretty much put me over into robot mode. I began the journey into 2019 by organizing a trip and a move for my nephew.