one thing i have learned about death, although i still fail to make any meaningful sense of it, is that whatever preconceived notion or imaginary scenario or "plan" you have to witness it--as if it were ever on your terms--is likely nothing like the reality of the experience. i suppose this is more true if you have not ever witnessed a person or beloved animal die. but because each death is as unique as the grief it creates, you can never 100% accurately predict when, how, or where someone will die. you may assume it looks like something else, a cobbling together of movie cliches and what you've imagined when someone who has witnessed it describes their memory of it to you. we may assume that yes, it will be horrifying, but we do not know just what will stick with us and haunt us. we do not know what bizarre feelings will strike us, as we watch the death of our beloved happen right in front of us.
my mother is dead, and the surreality of those four words throws me into another dimension as i type them. one where she didn't even get cancer. one where she lived to become a grandmother, where she outlived my dad, as she (we) had always thought. one where i can still come home and talk to her about my work day, or see an email from her pop up in my inbox. this dimension is where i exist about half the day. or rather, half of each moment of the day. i am constantly teetering between acceptance of reality and textbook disassociation. as i walk to work, i suddenly catch myself watching myself from outside of my body. as i explain the progression of her cancer to a coworker or my therapist, i hear a tiny voice in the corner of my brain, telling me i am going to wake up any second now. i walk into the house, dark and devoid of her warmth, and still think that if i look hard enough, i'll find her somewhere--buried at the bottom of a drawer, a tiny her jumping up and waving at me from inside a book. you finally found me! she says. i am relieved. the horror-fantasy is over.
losing sofia and my mother back to back has changed me irrevocably, and i don't yet know the full extent of these changes. i am still, after all, processing my mom's diagnosis, that phone conversation last summer when my blood drained down and out from my feet as we all stood in the kitchen and listened to the oncologist on speaker phone, saying words like "stage 4," "a year, maybe two," "chemotherapy," "unresectable," "palliative care." i am still processing the fact that she didn't even make it a year, which was on the conservative end of the doctor's estimate.
and i am still processing sofia's death, how i was not there for it as i had planned to be, as if it was something i could guarantee i'd be in attendance for, because it was going to be on my terms. i was so naive, but i still feel guilt for missing it, for making my mom be the one to stay with her that night--apparently, she laid on a yoga mat and slept next to her in her carrier while she faded. i'm still processing seemore the iii's death, too, that poor, sickly, sweet cat that my mom adored, that was truly her cat, and how my brother and she and i stood there last november saying the ave maria prayer in spanish while the life left her little body. i'm still processing the vet pressing the stethoscope into her fur and nodding solemnly, indicating that the deed was done. it was the first death i had (consciously) been present for, at least that of a loved one. it was mercifully quick, but still heartrending and disturbing. nothing can prepare you for how their last moments will play out, or for that awful feeling as you look upon the strange, stone-still form that once contained a soul. not just any soul, but the soul you knew like it was your own.
i may never fully understand death, and i suppose until we are the ones at the top of that queue, we simply can't. not totally. yes, hospice workers will be able to tell you when a person's time is near. they will give you the pamphlet with the bulleted lists of signs to look for.
no, i still do not understand how someone can be and then just ... not. as if they are deleted from the world. how can the person we tell everything to, not be here to listen to us tell them everything about this monumental experience? the very person that i would want to talk to the most about what i am feeling, everything that happened--she is not here. how? i have felt unmoored and untethered ever since she was first rushed to the hospital five weeks ago. less than two weeks later, she was gone.
i now know what it looks like when a person is actively dying, but i still cannot fully grasp that that was my mom. and most of all, i cannot comprehend how i'm supposed to live the rest of my life without hearing her gentle voice cooing at the cats or her geeky, endearing laugh at the same silly jokes from years ago. i cannot comprehend that the worn-out slippers that have been pushed underneath the couch will never hold her bunion-addled feet. that she now sits in stark silence in a black box on a shelf, in the room we both considered sacred.
i'm over at the apartment two doors down, but back at the house she died in, on her altar in that sacred room, a votive candle burns, the same little white candle i've burned every day since she left. my father sleeps alone in their huge bed. the marigolds that i bought and he planted in the backyard---next to the kooky, artsy shrine that she created two years ago, with an eagle statue and beads and shells and bent forks--sleep, too, or maybe they are just waiting for the sun to come out and warm them. because they know that it will. because it is their mother.
