It's Been a Year

Sunday was the day.  It was the day that it all changed, a year ago.  I didn’t know how to feel yesterday, and right now I still don’t know how I felt yesterday.  I sat, looking at the clock, recognizing the time that they started the morphine, when they took the tubes out, and when she passed.  I just sat there, looking, as if I was in some type of state of shock.  And today, as I sit at my desk on what appears to be a typical Monday, I wish that I was anywhere but here.  I want to sit somewhere, alone, and cry.  I didn’t want to do that yesterday; I didn’t know what to do with myself yesterday. But today, that’s what I want and need.  I want to leave work early and go somewhere and just cry.  I think yesterday was not as painful as I anticipated because the 11^th, in some ways, wasn’t the day that she died.  I had been preparing for it for weeks and then it happened.  In my mind, at that time, it was what had to happen – there were no other options; even after the morphine had been ordered my sister asked “maybe we should wait until tomorrow, give Dad one more day with her”, as if that would change anything.  I knew that it wouldn’t.  My mom wasn’t there anymore, or at least it didn’t feel like it was her anymore.  It was her body, which looked like her – at least it did while all of the tubes were still there;  once they took out the ventilator, without her teeth in she just looked like a sick old woman.  It didn’t look like my mom at all.

Today, as I sit here looking at the ring that I now wear that was once hers, I am sad.  I am so very sad.  For so many reasons.  All of the things that she has missed this past year with my daughter, all of the things that my dad has had to endure alone, all of it just makes me sad.  As I sat yesterday, looking at the clock, I was also watching my daughter and thinking “if only my mom was still here to see this”.  I know that somehow, some way she is watching – that whole blanket incident proved it in my mind – but she isn’t here.  She isn’t here to hug her, to tell her she is loved so very much.  She isn’t here to see the exuberance that child exhibits when the doorbell rings and she knows it’s my Dad; maybe she would do it for my mom too, I don’t know and I never will.  And neither will she.

I will never know what those last moments were like for her. I hope they were peaceful and easy, easier than they appeared to me.  And I hope that she is happy and that she understands that it was her time to go – even if we hadn’t turned off the machines she would have gone on her own sooner or later.  If she could have spoken, I know she didn’t want to stay on the machines and ‘live’ like that.  I hope that she isn’t angry with me; if she was going to be mad at anyone, it would be me.  And I understand why but still.  It’s something I continue to struggle with, a year after her passing, and I hope that is a struggle that gets easier as time moves on. I will never know if she’s mad or if she hates me still – she really didn’t like me for a while there before she passed away – all I can do is hope that she is at least happy and is at least watching over my daughter.  She and I were never really close, so I wouldn’t expect her to be with me.  I just hope she knows how much  I miss her and that I wish her peace and happiness where ever she may be.