Thursday, May 26, 2011

BLAST OFF

During my mother's semi-conherent stay at the hospice, she wanted to communicate her situation to the immediate family. On October 11, 2010, she was fairly lucid for most of the day. While Justin, Katie, Doug and I surrounded her bed, she began explaining. "The doctors have given me 6 months." We nervously exchanged glances. Just outside the door we had discussed this at length with the entire family. Katie sat closest to mom, hunched over and holding her hand. I sat on her other side studying the insteps of my shoes. Doug stood leaning on the foot of the bed donning his listening face, his head tipped back looking over his nose with his mouth hung open. Justin braced himself in a wide stance and his hands folded over his chest.

"They suspect I have pancreatic cancer, and at this point I have growths that are blocking my GI tract." Somebody swept her thought away, maybe a nurse came in or maybe she got sick again. After she fell asleep, the four of us sat outside and came to the conclusion that none of us needed her to explain this. We knew she had days, not months.

We helped her into a wheelchair sometime that afternoon and her head looked swollen. Someone asked her how she was feeling. "I feel, like," she explained and she waved her head back and forth to describe. The muscles in my body tensed and I found myself in a basketball defense position, although out of my mother's line of sight. I traded glances with one of my siblings. We were all doing the same thing.

At about midnight, all of us had gone home for the night (except Justin). Mom decided she wanted to get out of bed. Because of her oxygen tube, catheter, colostomy bag, and lidocaine IV, this made things complicated. Alarms bellowed and nurses rushed in. Justin stood palms up. What was he do to? She was dying. He couldn't stop her from anything, not that he could have on a normal day.

The nurses helped her into a wheelchair and she asked to be taken to the solarium at the end of the hospice. "Is there something that you'd like to do?" Justin asked. After a few minutes, he continued, "Is there anything you'd like to talk about?"

"Let's go to that side of the room and see if we can think of anything." Oscillating her over-sized head from one end of the room to another, she asked, "Is there a curtain here? I need some privacy." At one point during their short trip, she looked at him in her quirky way with a little shrug and a demure smile and said, "Blast off!"

She passed away just hours after this conversation. There was no curtain. She was awarded no privacy. Throughout the day, I heard my brother recount the story to our family. "When mom was coming in and out of consciousness and hallucinating, she asked me when the event was happening. She asked me multiple times when the blastoff was going to happen." She did not ask my sister or me. He assumed our mother was just losing her mind after the intensity of hospital care and painkillers but she was trying to communicate to him that she was going to die soon. None of us know what heaven is to be like, and couldn't it be just like a blastoff? Couldn't we just shoot off into space, into the infinity, into a place that we can't describe? Justin is an aeronautical engineer and speaks in space metaphors. This was her way of lightening and conveying such a dreadful message to her eldest child.

I now have BLAST OFF tattooed under my right clavicle. My sister has it on her left wrist and my brother has an entire rocket ship on his forearm. When I spot this black ink in the mirror, I don't feel saddened at all. In fact, I smile to myself. My siblings and I had our work done in the same tattoo parlor the day after mom died and I see this mark as my last attempt at pissing her off. As I've told my friends, "This is what she gets for dying!" When a stranger asks about it, I tell them it's a means for living my life and omit the idea that it could be a mantra for getting to heaven. I'm blasting off into my next adventure; I'm moving forward in my life. That is what my mom would want for me and these words remind me everyday.

3 comments:

  1. That's awesome! Cici was such a DYNAMIC personality. Now, I want a Blast Off tattoo!

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  2. Maggie-
    You have honored your mom with such dignity and honor. Your Mother would be so proud of the women you are.
    I truly look forward to all your writings. Thank you for sharing your Mother's journey with us.
    Tina

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  3. In theoretical physics, there is a fundamental law which, in part, states that time is not constant. It’s called the Theory of Relativity. So... There are places where time moves at a different rate than it does here. There may even be places where time is stretched to the extent that it essentially doesn’t exist at all. If you are going to one of these places, it’s possible that I am actually already there. We are already there, so I have already found you and I am sure that we are happy.

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