Farewell Normal - A Womanly Welcome

I wrote an essay back in September for Real Simple Magazine's Life Lessons Essay Contest and I have been holding off sharing it on my blog on the off chance I actually won something. The results were supposed to be posted to their website after the 14th and as of yet, still nothing, but at this point I'm pretty sure that it's safe to assume that I did not win anything.

Farewell Normal – A Womanly Welcome

​I was thirty years old, but in many ways still a child when my mom was admitted to the hospital for a “simple” case of pneumonia.  I was five years past the age at which I had expected to be married.  My friends were all married or getting married and some of them had begun having kids already.  All had moved forward in life while I remained perpetually single and resentful.  In my loneliness, I had come to rely heavily on my parents to distract me and entertain me. 

​The night my mom was admitted to the hospital, we stayed with her until she was situated in a room, then I went home with my dad for a few hours of sleep before visiting hours began again in the morning.  After a brief respite, as we were on our way back into town, my dad received news that my mom was not getting enough oxygen.  The rapid response team had been called and they needed his permission to sedate my mom and put her on a ventilator to help her get the oxygen she needed.   When we arrived, we were told that she had been moved to the Critical Care Unit, I remember thinking that things were more serious than I had initially thought, but I was confident that she would be fine in a week or so.

​In the Critical Care Unit, my mom was only allowed to have two visitors at a time.   My dad, my brother and I took turns visiting her, along with various other family members and friends who had come to offer support.  Late in the morning, my sister-in-law and I were standing at my mom’s bedside, talking to her as we normally would, making jokes and light-hearted conversation despite the alarming labyrinth of cords and tubes that encapsulated her.  The tube coming from her mouth stretched perilously for the ventilator that was pressing air into her lungs.  We could see her chest rising and falling with the rhythm of the machine – a rhythm that was far more abrupt and robotic than the flowing rise and fall of the chest I had laid my head on for comfort so many times as a child.

​Our banter was interrupted by a loud beep from the machine monitoring her vitals.  My eyes darted toward the screen and saw her heart rate slowly but steadily declining.  Simultaneously my heart rate skyrocketed in fear.  Because I was a Discovery Health junkie, I knew that if her heart rate got down to 30, they would call a code to prepare for cardiac arrest.  As it hit 35, the nurses in her room leapt to action, shoving my sister-in-law and me out of the way.  One of them turned to us and in a brusque tone, said, “You need to get out.”

​I went completely numb as I stumbled toward the exit of the Critical Care Unit, barely able to catch a breath.  Just before I reached the door, I heard them call a code blue to my mom’s room.  I staggered out to the waiting room and collapsed onto the floor crying so hard I felt as though my lungs would burst.  My dad and aunt asked what was happening, but I couldn’t speak.  It wasn’t until a nurse came out a few minutes later that they were plunged into the fear and pain I was feeling.  

​My mom had experienced a cardiac arrest.  Her heart rate had come back up with the help of some drugs but it would likely be at least an hour before she was stabilized.  In that moment, the reality that my mom might never leave the hospital pounded within me.  I had never considered that possibility.  Even the night before, as the doctor had discussed with her the importance of an “advanced directive” or a “living will,” I had shrugged it off as the neurosis of an overly dramatic doctor.  I had assumed that things would go back to “normal” in just a couple of days.

​As we waited for the nurse to return with an update and to be allowed back into my mom’s room, I came face to face with my own selfishness.  The past several years of conversations I’d had with her flashed through my mind like a slideshow of my narcissism.  As my mom cooked me dinner, helped me clean, went shopping with me, the conversation was the same.  “Why doesn’t anybody love me?”  “Why doesn’t anybody have time for me?”  “Nobody even cares about me.”  It was an endless cycle – Why? Why? Why? Me… Me… Me…  I had wasted so much time COMPLAINING.  To her, to my friends, to my co-workers, to anybody who would would listen.  Even my blog was filled with complaining.  And suddenly, as the possibility of losing my mom, my best friend, loomed overhead, I realized that in comparison, NONE of the things I’d been complaining about actually mattered at all.

​I was thirty years old, but emotionally I finally transformed from a girl to a woman in that waiting room.  I stopped being so selfish and started to focus on those around me.  I took up my cross and began to walk as a Godly woman.    Over the next 24 days as my mom remained in the hospital battling for her life, then slipping away, I learned to call upon the friends God had blessed me with to help me carry my burden so that I could take on the burdens of my family.  I made it a point to not cry in front of my family, particularly my dad.  I needed him to know that he could lean on me and I would not break.  I took on the responsibility of leading the family conversations in our meetings with the doctors regarding my mother’s care so that he wouldn’t have to.  It was what my mom would do, and so it became what I would do.

​After several weeks in the hospital, my mom’s body had been making good progress toward recovery, but even after being taken off of all sedatives, she was not waking up.  An MRI found that she had suffered a “storm” of mini-strokes.  Her brain was riddled with blood clots and reflected no activity.  She could be kept alive on a ventilator, but she was essentially an empty shell.  My mom had always said that she would not want to live if only a machine was keeping her alive, and so we prepared to say goodbye.  We spent an agonizing six days essentially just waiting for her to die.  I sometimes wanted to run away like the selfish child I had been before.  Other times I wondered if we’d made the right decision, but that was selfishness, too.  We had chosen to honor the wishes she had expressed during her life and I reminded myself that God was big enough to overcome that decision if it was His will to do so. 

​A week after we turned off the life support, my mom passed away.  I immediately threw myself into the process of planning a memorial service.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that I NEEDED to honor her, to serve her memory with as much care as she had served me for so long.  Much of my family was busy mourning while I was fighting to keep her alive for this last little while.  They showed their love for her in different ways.  I wanted to make the celebration of her life GRAND - partly because I felt that I had failed her by not marrying and giving her grandchildren while she was still alive - but mostly because I really wanted to serve her the way she had always served me.  I wrote her obituary with the utmost of care.  I pored through every photo album trying to find pictures for the program and the photo board.  I dug through recipe books for her favorite foods because in life my mom had mostly cooked foods that others liked though she wouldn't eat most of them.  So for her service, I would honor her by serving only HER favorites.  

​At the service, my uncle and I sang a song that my mother had sung to me as a child and I sang another one of her favorites on my own.  When the time came for my solo song, I stepped up in front of the gathering of friends and family and with a trembling voice sang out the words that spoke so true in that moment, “Que será será, whatever will be will be…”

​Over the next several months, those words continued to play in my head as I accepted the “will be” and began to step into my future, each part of that tragic month contributing a piece to the woman I was becoming.

​The time I spent helping my dad with the things my mom had always done helped to prepare me for the day I became a wife.

​The sleepless nights I spent at the hospital and the planning I did for the memorial service has helped me to be more confident in motherhood.

​And the lessons I learned about thankfulness in the face of difficulty have helped me to be a less selfish and more empathetic wife, mother, daughter, friend, co-worker, neighbor, leader and follower.