Mom

Some things happen in life that are inevitable but feel unbearable. It’s been fifty days since mom died and I’m not sure when this house will settle into it.

Her silver bird urn graces us on the entryway table upon our daily arrivals. So do the swallowtails she watched over, whose nest was in the corner of our front porch. Her bedroom, the first one to the left when you enter, still stacked with her most prized possessions-pictures of all her grandchildren.

I sit on my spot on the sofa and look over to the right where she sat on Friday nights, the place she’d sit when we’d watch movies together. The place she slept so many days before she died. The spot she sat when her hospice nurse would come on Mondays. Her spot.

I look in the freezer where her chocolate chip waffles were that she ate every day and I can’t buy strawberries, yet. Her partially eaten strawberry ice cream, I can’t throw out.

Our dining room table where we played dominoes every Wednesday night. So many hours of laughter, I’ve lost count over the last few years.

Death is inevitable but I don’t want it to be. I want her to come back and hug Addi and argue with me. I want to cut up her strawberries that go on her waffles and I want to sit and have long talks about things that broke our hearts and the things we’re grateful for.

We don’t talk about death like we should. We celebrate birth and a new life but as someone is coming to the end of theirs, we fill it with half-assed conversations that happen to be half-truths about what’s really happening to them.

We don’t allow people to tell their doctor they’re ready to not be in pain anymore and there’s another way. The needles and tests and medicines don’t work at some point and we need to say the hard things.

We celebrate life and all its newness but we fail to properly celebrate the old. The life well-lived. The lessons full of heartache but triumph. We don’t tell families they’re allowed to hold two opposing thoughts of celebrating their dying loved one and how to hold the pain of watching them go.

We don’t talk about the reality of death. The visions of the dead they experience and lost bodily functions and angry and sad death. We don’t prepare each other, so we never leave space for it.

We don’t we talk about the last moments of being completely worn out as a caretaker and wondering when it will ever stop-watching the death but as the death comes, feeling guilty for those feelings at all.

I knew mom was dying and so did she. She wanted to talk about it and we did-often. Her doctors, until she entered hospice, never did.

I hope as time goes on, we learn to not only celebrate life as it comes in but the soul as it’s passing through. I hope we learn to talk about what death really looks like. When you’re coming into the world, it’s messy and painful and beautiful. So is death.