The death of my mother changed me more than I’d like to admit.
Well, she had been sick for quite some time before, but what happened in May of 2014 almost came overnight. Her health declined rapidly over the course of a week. She started having weird tremors in her hands and became unable to walk. It looked like she had Parkinson’s Disease. She couldn’t talk or move. One night she went up to go to the bathroom and fell. She banged on the wall so I would hear. I was sitting at my desk when I heard and immediately jumped up and ran to her bedroom and saw her falling from the toilet. I helped her walk back to her bed and watched as she struggled to talk. She said the back of her head was hurting.
The next morning my dad took her to the hospital. It was there a few days later that we found out she had two brain tumors and lung cancer. The lung cancer part didn’t surprise me, as I had known my mom had been sick for years with COPD. But the brain tumor part floored me. When someone has been sick like that, you kind of already knew something had been wrong for a while, but when the reality actually hits — you just feel numb. Yet I wasn’t only numb. I was beside myself. I just wanted to be alone and cry. At my sister’s house, where my brother and I spent a few days after our mom was admitted, I stayed in the master bedroom by myself and cried and prayed, cried and prayed. I couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like a bad dream.
I couldn’t handle being around my niece and nephew anymore. Their sunny disposition and requests for me to play with them irritated me. Didn’t they know my mom was in the hospital? Didn’t they know I was falling apart inside? Of course not, they were just little kids. And it wasn’t their mother. I ended up going back to my house, all by myself. And slept in my room alone. My dad was at work and my brother stayed with our sister for a few days. It was the first night I stayed home alone and it was scary, and for some reason the thought of someone breaking in was overshadowed by the fact my mother was dying.
Things that happen when a crisis hits home. You become helpless, scared, and feel like you will lose your mind. I remember dry heaving in the bathtub thinking of the things my mother was going through. Sleep couldn’t even rescue me. I couldn’t sleep. I went almost a day and a half without proper rest because of the intense anxiety I was experiencing. I couldn’t eat. I felt like puking and crying and screaming and puking some more.
After my mom’s tumor removal surgery, she was admitted to a rehab facility where she stayed for almost a month. After that my dad took her out because it wasn’t helping and she came back home to stay with us. While it was a blessing for everyone to know she was home again, it meant I would be taking on responsibilities I was not prepared for. I was in charge of making sure my mom had everything she needed when she needed it. That meant giving her seizure medication and insulin shots early in the morning and at night, everyday. It meant keeping my cell phone close by my head at all times so when she needed a drink I could get it for her.
Since she couldn’t walk I had to give her a bedpan and clean it out every time she needed to use the bathroom. When that began to become too hard we had to resort to using adult diapers which weren’t even real diapers but incontinence-wear meant for leaks. I had no instruction or nurse teaching me how to do things, I had to do it all by myself. I couldn’t even lift my mom up to change her and as a result urine got all over her bed. I felt like a failure for not being able to properly care for her, and it hurt me. I felt helpless and angry. My dad was a truck driver and gone for days and I didn’t have any help. I remember one day my dad was home and I was able to have a break so I climbed into the non-running car in our driveway and curled up in the backseat and listened to Little Texas’s “You Got to Kick a Little” on my phone. I gained a little strength laying there listening to the lyrics. It was like getting a much needed pep-talk from a friend to keep going. And so I did. I kept on going.
God continued to give me strength. My brother-in-law took time off work to come and help me lift my mom from her bed so I could change her sheets. When we took her to radiation appointments we all shared a few laughs and kept a postive air about us. It strengthened me. It taught me to look for little things to enjoy, because it is the little things that give us strength to get through the hard parts of life.
Somehow I find that when we are faced with difficult life situations, we may struggle for a bit but we always gain a little bit of backbone that carries us through whatever we have to face. Soon I found solace in the support of my family, close and distant, and in God. Little things like going for bike rides and drinking Dr. Pepper began to help. Watching old VHS tapes of childhood movies began to soothe. And praying to God became strength. I found ways to get through it, no matter what happened. My mom’s illness taught me to look for little things to enjoy, because it is the little things that give us strength to get through the hard parts of life. And in the end, I knew everything was going to be alright. And it was. My mom passed away peacefully in hospice, Saturday morning at 9:30am surrounded by family. Free from pain and free from suffering. I had cried my tears the night before, and I knew my mom was now safe in the arms of Jesus.
Moral of my story? There is never an impossible second. I look back on my 20th year and see strength. I cannot believe I went through what I did, but I made it. It changed me for sure. I learned to press into a resource I did not know I had. And I survived.
And whatever you may face, you can too.
