Finding Myself

A friend of mine commented after Mother died that I'm an adult now and a member of the Orphans Club. We're both at that age where, all around us, our friends are losing parents. I went to yet another funeral just today. It was very hard because it's so close after my own mother died to have to see someone else going through this hell. It occurs to me, however, that I really AM an adult now. I don't have to "mind" anyone anymore. I don't have to be available at a moment's command. I don't have to plan anything around a parent's schedule or need. I can take off at Christmas now without feeling guilty. I can do pretty much anything now without feeling guilty about it because of displeasing a parent. 

There's a big catch to all this, of course. Now I have to figure out again what I want to be now that I've grown up. 

Losing Mother

The worst day of my life finally happened and went nothing like I thought it would. I had been anticipating a phone call from the healthcare facility where my mother lived telling me that she had slipped quietly away in the night because her weak heart stopped. What I got was a message from the local ER telling me that my mother was there because she had turned yellow and a scan showed a lesion on her pancreas. Fortunately, one of her guardian angels happened to be visiting at the center and went with her in the ER.  I had been hiking in the mountains where cell phone service doesn't work and only found the message later in the day when I got home. That was the first misfire in a long series of nightmarish events. 

I got to the ER and was told that mother probably had pancreatic cancer and could not have surgery because of her fragile health and advanced age. She was admitted to the hospital for more tests and to be watched because it was a weekend and her doctors would not be in until Monday. Mom's luck always ran that she got sick or fell on weekends. When her GI doc showed up, he told her her options. None were realistic. Her bile duct was blocked, and her liver was filling with bilirubin. Her blood sugar was also through the roof. This meant that she would soon fall into a coma and then die a painful death. The pain started almost immediately after she got the diagnosis from the doctor. 

Pancreatic cancer is insidious in that it is found mostly by accident, or the person turns yellow, or the blood sugar spikes astronomically. By that time, the prognosis is grim. All her bloodwork had been normal in July when she last saw her GP. He came to see her on Tuesday and cried with me. He knew she soon would be gone in a week, maybe less. It was less. She died the following Monday. Considering what most people go through over a long period, it was a blessing for her that she went so quickly. For me to watch it play out was a true nightmare. 

I decided to take her home. I hadn't put her house up for sale yet, thank heavens. She had wanted to go home, but I doubt she meant this way. This was a week after her diagnosis.  Mom was barely cognizant of her surroundings when we got there, but she did mouth the word "home" to two visitors later on the next evening. When we started the heavy pain meds, she really began to slip away, not in the quiet way I hoped, but in the gurgly, frightening way of those with pancreatic cancer. Her last breaths were those of someone drowning. My mom. My sweet, frail mother who should have had a peaceful death at her age and weakness died that kind of death. 

I'm angry. It's not fair. She had suffered so much pain already with a broken shoulder, two broken hips, and a deteriorating spine. She survived two bouts of sepsis, uterine cancer, pneumonia. We called her The Energizer Bunny. Then this. At whom, at what do I scream? Please don't tell me platitudes about being given no more than we can bear. She deserved better.