Saying Goodbye To My Mother

My mother died just over two weeks ago. She was 95-years-old, and while I knew she was near the end of her life, it still came as a shock to learn she’d had a massive stroke. Earlier in the day, I’d spent an hour with her in the garden of her care home. We’d marvelled at the birds and counted all the spring flowers that were popping up under the almost-blossoming cherry and plum trees. It had been a lovely visit — one of the most enjoyable we’d shared in months — and after I’d kissed her goodbye and started the twenty-minute drive home, I’d felt myself relax. Mom, it would seem, was settling in.

It had been a rocky couple of years. Until the end of December of 2020, my mother had lived independently in a one-bedroom condo just fifteen minutes from my home. She had received a visit from a health care worker each day to dispense her meds, and I had continued my role as chauffeur, shopper, companion, and the general putter-outer-of-fires.

Ours had been a long and complicated relationship — some of you may have read a story I wrote here a couple of months ago about the details of our dysfunction. If you did, you’d remember that my mother and I shared a codependent relationship that began when I was ten, and she was forty-four — right after my father ran off with a nineteen-year-old in the middle of the night.

After that day, I became Mum’s “go-to” — her emotional port in a storm and the one she relied on to “fix” her when the going got tough. As a result, I grew up ignoring my own emotional scars, evolving, instead, into a hardcore people pleaser.

From decade to decade, I made it my business to collect broken souls, determined to piece them all back together before setting them back on their way. It was only as my mother’s mental and physical health began to decline that I realized the unhealthy pattern of behaviour I’d created for myself.

That’s when I did some personal work. That’s also when I started to “get it.” But with comprehension comes responsibility, and I knew that no matter what, I was not going to be able to change the past. I could only control my future. And I was going to have to be accountable. My mother wasn’t the only one to blame.

Sure, if we live long enough to find ourselves a certain age, we’re all going to have history, but we don’t have to have baggage. Baggage, I’ve learned, gets heavier over time, and usually, the stuff we’ve been dragging around is not doing us any good at all. When we recognize that truth, we can finally stop, open the bag, examine its contents, “own the ugly,” and hopefully, let it fucking go.

Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. At least, it wasn’t for me. Because resentment, a natural reaction to injustice, is a nasty darkness that sits like a dead thing inside our chests. It casts a big shadow, and if we aren’t careful, it can block out all our light. What was it St. Agustine said way back in 398 AD?

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” So true. Resentment is probably one of the most toxic emotions we can feel. And over time, it can take its toll physically.

But while I’d read “all the books” and done “all the work,” I still found myself regularly shaking my fist at the sky for most of last year. Because it just wasn’t fair. When was I going to get my life back? Why couldn’t my mother let go of me? Why was she so negative? Dementia was a bitch, granted, but I’d felt as though I’d been on the end of her leash for decades. I could have cut loose years ago, but I hadn’t.

And now it was too late; I couldn’t abandon her in her final years, not when her cognition was deteriorating so rapidly. Hell, I wasn’t a monster. Or, was I?

But it’s strange how life works; in the weeks before she passed, my mother suddenly stopped complaining. She stopped crying when I visited her. She stopped demanding ridiculous things. And instead, she started smiling. When I showed up at her care home, she beamed. When we ventured out into the little garden, she celebrated the signs of spring and commented on the brilliance of the sunshine. When we sat together knitting in the common room, she teased me about my sloppy stitches, then laughed so hard she had to stop to clutch at her stomach.

As the days passed, we visited like two old friends. We looked at photos of her dancing days in England during the war. We watched old black and white movies on the big screen TV — From Here to Eternity and A Streetcar Named Desire. I read her some stories, and sometimes she read to me. We ate lemon tarts together, along with cups of weak sugary tea. And I realized, finally, that we were just “being” together, living in the present moment, with no thought to the past or where the future might lead us. I think it was cathartic for both of us.

After that last visit together, I arrived home at 6 pm to receive the call; my mother had had a stroke.

I was stunned.

“You’d better come now,” the nurse said. “She isn’t conscious.”

Half an hour later, my husband and I were ushered into a small room overlooking the garden. The lights were low, and someone had thoughtfully lit a little candle in the window. Somebody else had placed Mum’s favourite photographs on the table beside her bed, and her little stuffed dog, “Brandy,” sat near her pillow.

From the speakers in the corner of the room, soft music played, infused with nature’s gentle sounds: seagulls calling, waves crashing on the shore, and a foghorn in the distance. Mum would approve, I thought, because Mum loved the ocean more than anything.

And so began the vigil: my husband and I sat on either side of her bed. He held her hand and I brushed her hair. Occasionally, a nurse would come in to see how we all were.

“I don’t think it will be long,” she told us at ten p.m. “Just be with her.”

At eleven-thirty, my mother’s breathing became more laboured. She shifted a little under the blankets, and her eyes fluttered.

At eleven forty-five, she took her very last breath. I still can’t articulate the myriad feelings I experienced at that moment. There were many: loss, relief, sadness, gratitude, but the biggest one was the aching tenderness I felt in my heart. My mother was gone, and as I squeezed her hand, I closed my eyes, imagining she was back at the Bournemouth Pavillion; back in 1944 — the veritable “Belle of the Ball” — kicking up her heels with wild abandon.

Dance all night long, Mum, I said out loud. And then I smiled.

I’d never watched anyone die before, so I don’t have anything with which to compare my mother’s passing. But I am grateful for so much. I’m thankful for the peaceful room she spent her last few hours in, for the fact I was able to be with her as she crossed over from one journey to the next. But mostly, I was grateful my mother had been so content in the weeks leading up to her death.

Looking back, it all feels like a gift — one my mother and I gave to each other. After so many years of tamped-down frustrations — mine, at the vice-like hold my she’d always had over me, and hers at her lifelong inability to address her own wounds, we just let it all go. The baggage was just too much. And what did it matter now, anyway? It was all in the past, and I know with utmost certainty, my mother did her absolute best.

Sometimes lessons come in ways you least expect. And often, it’s the biggest challenges that teach us the most. I’ve learned a lot in the past two weeks, especially about the human heart’s capacity to heal.

Thank you for that, Mum. Rest in peace. I love you.