Losing Mom

The first two weeks after Carson was born were blissful. Yes, I was exhausted and sore (birth hurts!), but I was also thrilled to have my sweet baby boy in my arms at last. And he was such an easy baby in those early weeks. He only cried when he really needed something and he would stop as soon as the need was met. When he woke up at 2 am for a feeding, I could nurse him and then lay him down to sleep. There was no walking and bouncing and shushing required in the middle of the night. He would just lay there and make cute little baby sounds until he fell asleep again. It was completely different from the troubled start our poor Claire had with her severe acid reflux, and we were thankful he wasn't having to go through what she endured. He was healthy, happy, and in my arms. It was wonderful.

And then came the sick. From the time Carson was two weeks old, until he was 10 weeks old, we had 4 rounds of sickness run through our house. Poor Claire caught all 4, Carson and I caught 3, and even Josh (who NEVER gets sick) caught a round. These were no simple cold bugs. One of them left me with 103 fever for three days straight. While nursing a newborn. Another felt exactly like the flu, minus the fever. We spent the weeks passing misery (and the tissues) around the house and even our sweet newborn was not exempt. There was no sleep to be had in our house with two sick kiddos.

But that was not the worst of it. The worst happened on May 1, when Carson was only 6 weeks old. The kids were in the middle of round 2 of "the sick" and I was just getting that tickle in my throat that told me I was about to join the party. My phone rang, and it was my mom's apartment complex manager, asking if I had heard from my mom lately. I told her we texted back and forth about two weeks earlier, but I hadn't heard from her since. That wasn't really alarming because my mom often ran out of minutes on her phone and sometimes it would be a while before she had more. It wasn't uncommon for her to be out of touch during those times. I explained that to the manager, and suggested she just go to see mom at her apartment rather than calling on the phone. The manager said she would do that and she gave no indication there was any concern, but I did ask her to call me back if she was still having trouble reaching my mom. I felt a little uneasy when I realized it had been two weeks since I heard from Mom. With a newborn and all the sickness in our house, the time had passed without much notice. I was buried in diapers and dirty kleenex. I hadn't looked at a calendar in weeks. Couldn't even tell you what day of the week it was before that moment. I called my mom, but it went straight to her voicemail. Yes, she must be out of minutes.

That afternoon, my husband kissed me and the kids and headed out the door to a meeting. A few seconds later he walked back in and said, "We have a problem." I looked past him through the open door and saw a police car parked in front of my house. Two people got out and started walking toward our door. I never made the connection. My mind was racing, trying to figure out why they were there. Did we have an unpaid ticket I didn't know about? Did someone hear my sick baby crying and think we were pulling out his fingernails instead of just sucking the boogers out of his nose? I could not understand why they were at my door, but I invited them in. I stood there in yoga pants and a cotton robe, bouncing a crying baby with green stuff oozing out of his nose while my 3 year old sat on the couch, wrapped in her pink blanket, looking pitifully ill. The house was a mess, I was a mess, and my brain could not grasp the meaning of this police officer's presence in the middle of my living room. A woman stepped through the door, introduced herself, and said, "I'm sorry. You're mother is dead." All the air left the room.There was a vacuum of time and space in that moment. It must have lasted a split second, but it felt much longer. I realized she was holding out her business card to me. I reached up to take it and saw that my hand was shaking. I took the card from her hand. I wanted to know what happened. They didn't know. It looked as though she had laid down to watch tv and fell asleep. No one had seen or heard from her in at least a week. They were going to do an autopsy and would have the results in about six weeks. She gave me another number to call for more information and then they were gone as quickly as they had come. Only everything was different now. My world was different than it had been 5 minutes before.

I was in shock. My mother had health problems, but there was no indication that she was on her death bed. She seemed to be managing her chronic conditions well and sounded relatively healthy the last time we spoke. What happened?

I have read that sometimes, when something is just too big to handle, people focus on the little things, the details. And I suppose that's what I did. I needed to focus on something I could do, because focusing on what I was feeling was unbearable. I was my mom's only child, and my parents divorced decades ago, so her final affairs would fall to me. I had to start with the worst task of all - telling the family. I called one of her sisters and stumbled out the news. The moment after - the small gasp, the silence - was more than I could bear. The rest of the conversation was a battle between my brain and my heart. I wanted so desperately to not feel what I knew I would have to feel - that pain. It would be easier to focus on facts, the phone calls that needed to be made, what I knew of my mom's medical situation. But the pain wasn't going away and I couldn't bear to make that phone call, to deliver that news over and over and over again. So I asked my aunt to take over the calls, and thankfully, she agreed.

I spoke with the apartment manager and, while she was very kind and sensitive to the situation, she did explain that we needed to empty the apartment quickly or rent would be due since it was the beginning of the month. So the next day, we went to the apartment. It was cold and overcast that day, and I could feel round 3 of "the sick" taking hold that morning. We took Claire to a play center for the morning and I brought the baby carrier so I could strap my newborn to my chest to keep him warm while we went through mom's apartment.

The manager warned me about the mess. They had to break down the door to get in because the security lock was engaged. And then animal control had to move things around trying to get to mom's cat, who was apparently quite talented at hiding from intruders.

I walked into the living room where my mom had died. It was a mess. The furniture was disheveled, mail from the counter was scattered on the floor, and there was a sense that something terrible had happened there. My mom didn't have much, and we didn't have a trailer, a storage room, or even boxes (how did we not think to bring boxes?). We were only there for the really important things - personal and medical papers, pictures, family mementos. The manager said she could have a local charity organization pick up the rest. That same organization had helped my mom when she first moved here, so I thought it was fitting to donate the items back to them. We worked as efficiently as we could with a sick, crying baby on a very cold day (the apartment heater had been turned off). We sorted through everything, and packed up the important things in boxes the apartment manager had been kind enough to send over to us.

As I walked through the small apartment, I noticed every picture on the wall like I was seeing it for the first time. Almost all of them were of us or Claire. I realized just how much Mom loved us, how proud of us she was, what a big part of her life we really were. I realized just what we meant to her in that moment, in a way that I never had before. It was overwhelming. When Josh loaded the last of the boxes into our SUV, I asked him to give me a minute alone. I stood in the living room where my mother had lived and died, and I spoke to her. I told her how much I loved her and how I knew she loved me. I talked to her as tears streamed down my cheeks and landed on the the baby's head as he was still strapped to my chest. I wrapped my arms around him as I introduced my mother to my son and wept. I looked around and had the distinct feeling of being surrounded by my past as I held my future in my arms. It was the intersection of where I came from and where I was going. I was overcome. I knew that when I walked out that door, I would never be back. The rest of her things would be cleared out, someone else would move in, and it would be as though she was never there. It was hard to close that door behind me. But I did. I wiped the mascara from my cheeks with a baby wipe, and avoided all eye contact asI returned the key to the apartment manager.

The weeks that followed were soaked in tears, though my husband was probably the only one who saw them. There were plenty of tasks to keep me busy - accounts to close, transferring her remains, planning the memorial. But then something would happen. I would see a mother's day card and lose it. I would hear a song and be reduced to a sobbing mess. Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night and realize there were tears streaming down my face. I didn't even know you could cry in your sleep. You can. I had terrible dreams of other loved ones dying, of my children dying. But one night, I had a very different kind of dream. I dreamed about my mom. In my dream, she showed up in my house. I was scared at first because I knew she was dead, but she reassured me that she was fine, that she was happy. And she looked it. She looked happier and healthier than she had in years. She looked like an enormous weight had been lifted from her heart and she was care-free and vibrant.  She expressed her love for us and her joy in seeing us, and we did the same. We had fun together and just enjoyed each other's company. And then I woke up. It was the first time I had felt any peace since her death.

I never saw my mother's body after her death. There were varying thoughts on the timeline and we were told she may have been dead for days or even a week or two before she was found. And then there was the autopsy. Her body had been through a lot since her death. After much soul-searching and a conversation with the medical examiner's office and the funeral home director, I decided that I preferred to remember her as she was. So she was transferred to the funeral home for cremation. A few days later, I arrived with a beautiful wooden urn. They transferred the ashes and brought the inurned remains to me. I held that box, and my eyes filled with tears. That was all I had now - that urn and her death certificate, a box and a piece of paper. I could not get out of that funeral home fast enough.

We had a small memorial service for her in June, so that my daughter and I could have some closure. Then, six weeks after her body was found, we finally had the autopsy results - renal failure due to diabetes and an enlarged heart. They believe she fell asleep watching tv and never woke up, no pain, just drifted off.

It has been almost nine months since I was told my mother was dead, and I have mostly accepted her death. In the early months, I would forget sometimes. I would reach for the phone to call her, or I would look at the calendar and think, "Wednesday is free this week. We should go visit Mom." That doesn't happen anymore. And I don't cry as often now as I did in those early months, but I still think about her a lot and I do still cry sometimes.

I thought I would miss her most for the big stuff - holidays, birthdays. But it turns out, it's in the every day moments. When I hold my baby boy up high and kiss his tummy until he squeals with laughter, I'll have a thought, "I wish Mom could see this." When I cook a good dinner for my family, I'll think, "I wish I could invite Mom over to eat with us. She would have liked this recipe." Or when one of the kids learns how to do something new, I wish I could call and tell her how amazing her grandbabies are.

This spring, we will take Mom's remains to El Paso to be buried in the family plot beside her mother, father, and brother. I know that's what she would want, but I'm also dreading leaving her there. It feels like having to say goodbye all over again. It feels very permanent, very real. But I think it is where she would want to be buried, and I want to honor that.

On Monday, March 3, 2014 at 1 pm, we will have a graveside service at Evergreen Cemetery, 12400 Montana, El Paso TX 79938.  Any family or friends who would like to say their goodbyes to my mother are welcome to join us.

You can also view her obituary here. Please note the date listed in the obituary for the Celebration of Life and burial has been changed. The service has been rescheduled and will now be on March 3, 2014 at 1pm.