The Hard Goodbye

Over more than forty years, my beloved mother and I have been saying emotional goodbyes – often long, tearful embraces at airports – because, well, you never know. The first time, Mom put her only daughter, just 22, onto a plane en route to a year of volunteering in Europe. When I was 25 she tearfully saw me off for two years in the Indian subcontinent.  We wept as my husband and I took our 4-month-old son to Lithuania, and again later when our family, with three school-age children, left for 3 1/2 years in England.  We cried because we loved each other’s company so genuinely and because these distances were so far and because handwritten letters just weren’t the same as being together.  We would hold one another, stroking each other’s faces, saying, “You are so precious to me. I love you. I hope that we get to see one another again.”  

Finally my family settled back in Canada.  Our jobs in Saskatchewan meant we were close enough to her home in BC for regular phone calls and in-person visits once or twice a year.  The years passed.  My dad died in 2013, but Mom continued to live happily in their two-bedroom place, welcoming us gladly whenever our family  made the trip west.  In the fall of 2019, shortly after I had spent a happy November long weekend at her place, Mom was admitted to hospital with an infection.  At the age of 93, she now needed a level of care which necessitated a move into a seniors home.  She had barely settled into Westminster House before Covid-19 brought its lockdown.  Once again we were reduced to phone calls.

This June, a week-long visit reunited us after the Covid closures.  My son Carl and I spent afternoons with Mom while staying nearby with my brother.  We hugged and laughed, sat close, looked at old photos, played Tri-Ominos, told stories.  I gave her a foot massage.  How good it all was. 

At the end of this happy summer, Mom suddenly went into decline as the result of an undiagnosed infection.  By mid-September she had stopped eating and drinking.    I flew out to be with her as she was admitted to hospital, drawn, severely dehydrated, and beginning to hallucinate.  Over the week we were together, as IV treatment continued, she began to recover her appetite and her sense of self, including her amazing sense of humour.  Side by side on her bed with my iPad, we FaceTimed family members and looked at pictures.  Though her strength and mobility had declined, her energy brightened. My brother and I met with health care workers about transition to a higher level of care back in her seniors facility.  I gave her a foot massage. 

On the last day of my visit the time came to say goodbye.  After we prayed together, she looked intently and joyfully at me, exclaiming with enthusiasm, “Oh, Darlene, I love you!”  We shared a long, tender embrace before I left the room.  

Five days later, early on the first night back in her own place, Mom took a fall which shattered her pelvis. She was returned to hospital where, despite efforts made towards a recovery, it soon became clear that Mom was in her last decline.  Two weeks after she fell, with Mom once again not eating and barely sipping water, the doctors moved her from recovery care to comfort care.  Once again I booked an urgent flight to Vancouver and was thankful she was still living when I arrived at Peace Arch hospital.  While my brothers did the physical work of clearing out the rooms she would never return to, I made arrangements to stay through the nights in the private hospital room into which she had been moved.  Other than an hour or two each day when I went for a shower and a meal at my brother’s home, I settled in next to Mom. 

I came with the desire that I might accompany my gentle, beauty-loving mother to a good and Christian death.  Perhaps, I hoped, hers might even be a beautiful and holy death, a thin place where heaven felt very near, that one could speak of afterward as an example of grace in and for Mom.  In my bag were prayers and readings to surround her with reminders of our belief in resurrection and promises of God’s never-failing presence.  Even though, numbed by painkillers, she lost consciousness within our first day together, I knew that her hearing would be the last of her senses to go, and put a brand new battery into her hearing aid.  

For the next five days I stayed with Mom amid the coming and going of the nurses, the adjusting of comfort meds in response to her ebbs and flows, the family who brought me McMuffins and hashbrowns. In the quiet moments, I read scripture aloud. I read from the prayer resource “Every Moment Holy”, hoping to find expressions of what she might be feeling.  I read the evocative ending of C.S. Lewis’ “The Last Battle” where he imagined new heaven and new earth, the reunions of old friends.  One evening my cousin Robyn and I together sang some hymns for Mom, favourites like “Be Still My Soul” and “Surely Goodness and Mercy”.  We chose familiar, beloved songs so that even if she couldn’t clearly hear the lyrics, she could sing along in her heart.  As Mom’s breathing became laboured and wet, I played gentle music from my iPad, hoping to distract her from the shocking sounds of her own hard breathing.  At night I laid on the floor next to her, setting my alarm to check on her every hour or so or whenever I was jolted to my feet because it seemed there had been too long of a pause between breaths. 

It didn’t feel like a holy place. It was just a hard place – a hard place where I wanted to be. I didn’t want her to be alone. Inside the swollen, splayed body was the mother so precious to me, and the unrecognizable hand was still warm for me to hold in ways I never would again in this mortal life.  So I stroked her shrunken face, her forehead (taut and pursed in deep concentration at the mere act of breathing), and stroked moisturizer around her dehydrated mouth, because these would be our final days before the long separation until resurrection.  I massaged her feet.  

And I marvelled that someone so physically fragile, with nothing to eat or drink for so many days, had stamina for the work of pulling each hard breath over her shrunken tongue. The muscles in her jaw and neck strained visibly, over and over.  

On Tuesday, October 12 at 8:00 p.m., Mom died.  She did not go peacefully; she did not go gentle.  She died like a marathon runner whose energies were spent and who collapses over the finish line, carried by those around her.  She died with a clenched jaw as I wept, holding her swollen hand, then scrambled desperately to find an appropriate prayer. 

As the nurses removed IV lines and settled her spent body, I read over her, through tears, from “Every Moment Holy Vol II”: 

“You have interceded for me, Jesus, 

and you will unfold this mortal husk 

unto an eternity in which death will be remembered – if 

at all – only as an ancient enemy forever 

conquered and crushed; recalled only as a part 

of the ongoing story of the glory 

of the Risen One who at last 

defeated all enemies and healed all wounds…”

Sitting next to Mom, I called my brother, my husband, my kids. Speaking with my niece Amy, stroking my mother’s still warm arm, I noticed with amazement that her hand, which had been so swollen, suddenly looked normal, looked like her own hand, the hand that had caressed me my whole life.

In the quiet of the hospital room, I sat next to Mom for a while, knowing I would not see her body again, caressing her skin, kissing her forehead. I felt deeply grateful that she had not passed alone in the dark as I was sleeping, that I had not had to make those dreaded middle-of-the-night calls. I walked through the room packing up my things as she lay still and quiet.  It was hard to put on my mask, walk out of the room, and leave her there.  Unlike all of our airport partings, this was truly, with certainty, the hard goodbye. 

In recent conversation, a friend described being with her father and her husband as her mother passed away – one large breath before she fell back against her pillow.  That is the kind of experience I had hoped and longed for, where it felt like the air was palpable with angels and glory.  Instead, for my gentle mother, this crucifixion. 

I’m conflicted as I think of the time I spent with Mom in hospital.  As much as she had said that she was ready to go, I had a sense while with her that she felt afraid, anxious, maybe even angry.  When I read portions of scripture or prayers about dying, I just didn’t feel she was as eased or comforted as I hoped she would be.  God, how I long to trust that you met her in ways that I cannot know and that you hold her still.