But I didn’t find what I needed. Everything was about coming to terms with death ― not what it was actually like to die or watch someone die. The only helpful thing I found was that those stories reiterated the shitty normalcy of my mom’s situation: Lots of people die from cancer .
My stepdad and brother and I had a discussion and then we carefully approached the idea of hospice care with her. Her immediate response — “No, people go into hospice care and are dead two weeks later”AdvertisementCourtesy of Sarah Hunter Simanson What made it worse is that even after my mom signed the papers, she didn’t want to accept the reality of her situation. “I can still get better. There are people who walk out of hospice,” she told me.Her continued denial made it that much harder when her body showed us it wasn’t getting better. It started with her urine. She peed less and less. The liquid turned from a pale yellow to a darker amber to a deep orange to dark brown. Then her feet turned blue.
My mom didn’t want to move to an in-patient facility. Often, in those movies and TV shows, death looks prettier and cleaner than it is. It’s sad but peaceful. I’m sure for some people it’s that way, but it wasn’t for my mom, and the rose-colored lenses that pop culture uses to depict dying at home wasn’t worth actually keeping her at home. An ambulance transferred her to a local hospital’s hospice facility.
The last photo the writer took with her mom."It was taken in August 2018 after my daughter was born and right before my mom's health began to precipitously decline," she writes.I used to think that talking about my mom’s final month, especially those last days, would take away her dignity, especially because she didn’t want to be remembered for who she was when she was sick.
You have my utmost sympathy. I had to consent to turning off my husband's ventilator. It's the hardest thing I've ever gone thru.
Very uplifting. Thank you.
Thanks for writing. My mom recently went through a similar experience with my grandmother.
Only God can get you through this healthy.