The Thin Line

WARNING: morose entry, heavy duty, if you're looking for lighthearted fun, see ya tomorrow!

Did you ever have something happen to you, an event so pivotal in your life that it completely changed you as a human being and left life as you knew it in the dust? For me, it was the death of my mother. On July 31, it will be 14 years ago. Every July, I fall into a terrible hazy, numb state. I feel like I'm just going through the motions with everything. It's not even an active depressive state, it's like a biological clock sort of thing where my very being is transported back to that time even if it isn't something I'm aware of. My body knows it's the anniversary even if I do not think of it in my conscious brain.

I start feeling a strange emptiness, an irritation with people who complain about silly things. Usually, I'm not even aware of why I feel this way till I look at the calendar. Then it hits me. This year, the trigger for me is a patient I am treating who reminds me of my Mother. She is dying. She knows it and so does her family. Everyday, she is worse than the day before. My purpose is to make her comfortable and help her family figure out the best ways to bath, dress, feed and transport her from her bed to her wheelchair to her shower. I have to order the proper equipment for them, teach them how to use it and just make sure things go smoothly for them in this way.

The thing is, every time I visit her, she pulls me toward her and I end up sitting on the bed with her for an hour and 1/2 and we hold hands and talk and laugh.I am actually supposed to be there for 30 minutes but I enjoy her so much I choose to stay on my own time. At this point, I am the only one who talks to her like she is not dying. I ask her about her life, what she did for a living, what are her best recipes and can she give them to me, was she a good dancer, what are her favorite songs/books/movies...etc etc. Once, I had a lovely patient who was very depressed and very sick and used to cry all day and not want to get out of bed. He told me that he used to live for taking his late wife ballroom dancing every Saturday night and he missed those times. I bought him a boom box and some big band CD's and asked him to teach me how to dance. Do you know that this man who was so frail he could barely walk to the bathroom could still cut a rug and swept me off my clumsy feet? I used to visit him three times a week and I looked so forward to it. We would laugh and carry on. He even used to listen to the music late at night when he was alone and couldn't sleep. When he finally did pass away I went to his funeral and his family brought the music and played it during the wake,. It was really a wonderful tribute to him. This is not part of my job. But I always do this with people who are near the end. There is something so important to me in knowing who this person was while they can still tell me before they go and their flesh and blood presence is gone forever. I feel so full inside when they light up and tell me who they were/are. Their pain seems to vanish, they become animated and they leave the sick bed and become a regular person again even if only for an hour.

This may sound really strange but the most sacred part of this for me is that it gives me a feeling of being closer to my own Mother. I know this might sound really creepy or ghoulish but I feel like the line between here and the other side is thinner near a person who is about to go. Does that make sense? It's not as if I'm "using" them. I just feel like it's a very sacred thing and a privilege to be with a person who is transitioning like this.

Today was a bad day, I cried like a baby a few times remembering my Mother and the day she left me. I don't know why I'm feeling so melancholy lately but it just seems to be washing over me like gentle, lapping waves...back and forth, ebb and flow. I won't allow myself to think of the circumstances of her death right now, I just can't. It puts me in bed for a day. Instead I'm going to choose to remember the two important pieces of advice she gave me the week before she left me when I asked the question "what will I do when you leave me? I'm going to be all alone... How will I live without you?"

My mother knew this would be a terrible challenge for me having no siblings or other family. She simply said "never make anybody so indispensable to you that you think you can't live without them because you can and you will go on". She also said "lots of people love you, you have to let them .If you let them in, you will never be alone". Advice custom made for me. She knew what it was like to be alone after her parents and my father died and she knew what it was like to think you can't survive and go on and manage to pick up the pieces and do it anyway. She also knew that I tend to isolate and pull away from people. Those pearls of wisdom were spoken to me by someone who knew me better than anyone on earth 14 years ago and they still hold true today. I also have been remembering her telling me that I was put on earth for others, not myself. When I get really caught up in myself and me me me, I always pull this one out and it makes me see how silly I am being and that I need to take the focus off myself and try and be there for someone else.

Thank you Mom, for everything you gave me then and for everything you keep giving me now. xoxoxoxoxoox

To anyone who slogged through this downer of a post, thanks for reading and we will be back to our regularly scheduled programming tommorow!