Losing Mum

It’s now two months and 6 days since mum suddenly upped and died.  I don’t know which stage of the five-step grief process I’m in, but I suspect it is going to last for a long time.  I think my mind has done a bit of a loop. First was total shock, then numbness as I organised the funeral, then overwhelming sadness and sense of loss.  But now I’m back to shock and disbelief.

I suppose for anyone stumbling across this Blog, I need to fill you in with a few details.  I don’t mean this to be a morbid blog, nor one that reduces people to tears.  But I suppose it is about losing my mum, so it’s going to have sadness.  But I also want to have some light and smiles.  After all, that was the kind of person she was – always smiling, as the photo shows.  I haven’t mentioned this Blog idea to any of my 3 siblings. Maybe they will have an issue – we’re a kind of ‘keep-things-private-family, but they are my feelings only and my memories.  Maybe there will be some catharsis for me from writing them.  I also hope that anyone else who is going through/gone though a similar grief will find some comfort and maybe want to share some of their own feelings on these pages.

But here is what happened.  Okay, I know mum was old, she was 92 when she died on January 31, and would have been 93 on April 25 2014, BUT, she was so full of life and nobody would ever have known this was her age.  Mum lived with me for the past 8 years, so I saw her on a daily basis.  She was planning to visit my sister in Luxembourg in the second week of February.

She’d been having a lot of pain in her spine and hip recently and we thought the pain was related to her osteoporosis or the old injury from when she fell a couple years ago and shattered her femur (but had a successful hip replacement).  She’d been on a lot of pain medication, and increasingly since beginning of January. On Thursday, 30 January 2014 she was in so much pain that the physiotherapist thought she should be admitted to hospital for scans and pain management.  They called an ambulance and Mum and I spent the day in A&E that day.  She was admitted to the acute medical ward that evening.  The following morning, I went to see her; she didn’t look great, was feeling sick, and still in pain. She was also dehydrated and on a drip.  The doctors spoke to me about altering her pain medication and probably transferring her to a different ward after the weekend, where she could have some rehab and physio before being discharged – probably at the end of that week.  But in the meantime, they would do some CT scans that afternoon.  The hospital pharmacist came to see me to ask me to get her local pharmacist to call him to discuss the changed medication.

So despite her looking ill and seeming agitated, which were unusual, I assumed there was nothing life-threatening.  I told mum that I’d pop home to make her some soup to bring back later.  Lunch had looked disgusting and she said it was tasteless.  So, I though I’d make one of her favourites – split pea and ham soup .  Furthermore, my sister was due from Luxembourg to visit that afternoon and was going straight to the hospital from the airport. So I thought they could have a few moments alone together.

Before I could finish making the soup, I got a call from the hospital telling me to come immediately as my mother was gravely ill.   I knew that could only mean one thing – she was dying.  For a moment, I was frozen on the spot, then started screaming.  Nothing made sense. They’d taken her for CT scans, returned to the ward and she vomited.  How could someone die from that?

I rushed back to see her. It was pouring with rain; couldn’t get a taxi immediately, but luckily my husband arrived back from a meeting and drove me there.  Only ten minutes away.  But ten minutes too late.  I rushed to her bed to find my sister, but not mum. At least not the mum I’d left a few hours earlier.  She’d died a few minutes before I got there.  Her body was lying on the bed, as if sleeping, but she had left it behind.  She’d gone where I couldn’t follow.  She’d gone where no words could reach her. No more wondrous stories or megawatt smiles from her.

I couldn’t even say goodbye.  Little did I know that my farewell to her, was me saying:  “I’ll see you later.”  However I have the comfort of the memory of mum cradling my head between her hands, then kissing my fingers before she blew me a kiss as I left.  If I’d known, I would have caught that kiss and zipped it in my pocket forever, instead of letting it brush me casually.  It was if she’d left in the middle of a conversation.  I wanted to scream, “We haven’t finished!”  But that was not my call.

Mum in fuchsia