Day 45: The First Goodbye

I will never forget the day I really lost my mother— it weeks before she passed, around this time. By then Mark and I had our routine down. Ma was in the hospital full time now. Our late auntie Karen had transformed into an angel and stayed at the hospital 3-4 nights a week (if not more) with her. Gran would stay when she could. But we still had school, Mark was enrolled at Cass Tech and I was pushing through my junior year at Wayne State. Every day it was the same thing.. Early rise, get mark to school, I go to class, wait for him to come out and then we do our nightly drive to Ann Arbor to spend time with Ma before driving back to Detroit. Then we do it all over again.

One day, I was headed to the hospital during the day and before I got there I got a call from Auntie Karen. She told me that at some point through the night, “there was a dramatic shift in her communication.” What does that mean? Upon getting to her room she looked as if she was sleeping. My auntie told me that she’ll be coherent enough to ask for water and have small dialog for only about 10 minutes at a time. I didn’t know how to take that. It crushed me. She was actually slipping away. She wasn’t actually supposed to slip away, God was supposed to turn it around before it got to be too late. Too late was approaching. The cancer spread to her brain. Reality starts to kick in. I waited for her next upturn and I had to introduce myself to her. All I could say was “I love you.” There was nothing else to say. I remember afterward finding a corner in the hallway and wailing on the phone with Auntie D. I got a taste of what its like to have a parent with dementia. What an awful experience that must be.

Theres not much of a resolve here with this story. Just a memory passing through. This year will mark 5 years… 5 YEARS. Oh, how I have grown. I look at Mark and it moves me to tears, I look at him for her through her eyes. Our baby grew up, and he’s perfect. He turned out just how she would have wanted him to. I look at myself and I am certainly not perfect but I see a solider in the mirror, like my grandfather. I’m proud of who I am, proud of the parts of herself she poured into me. I try not to think too heavily upon those moments. I think that the death of Jesus content so much about how to process the loss of someone who suffered greatly. It's so easy to get lost in the suffering, they suffered so you suffer even more. It's easy to get caught up in the memories. I watched my mother get attached to opioids because her pain was so high. I hear her voice begging me for more because her pain was so high. All the little nuances that can go wrong in the human body. One medication helps those both dismantles another function in your body. End it becomes an endless cycle of medicating trying to find the right balance, but there is none, you always lose something with Western medication pushed by Western doctors. But I try not to think about that. I think about how deeply Jesus suffered. He suffered so many different ways, it was psychological it was emotional not just physical. I would dare say he suffered one of the most painful ways to go, being crucified really means you suffocate to death. This plus his flesh having been shredded, arm dislocated, nails hammered through his feet and wrists. We are taught to never forget that suffering but also to remember what happened just three days later — transcendence. “When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He yielded up the ghost.” He's not suffering anymore. She's not suffering anymore.