It took my sister and me nearly a week to piece the story together and figure out what happened to Mom. Mom’s quality of life had deteriorated quite a bit in the previous year. Mom’s health had deteriorated too. She experienced almost daily bouts of severe pain from arthritis that was no longer adequately controlled by drugs. She was past the halfway point for battery life on her second pacemaker. Her pacemaker had a built-in defibrillator, but the third wire had recently failed and the defibrillator functionality had to be turned off. Just two weeks earlier, unbeknownst to me, she had been diagnosed with necrosis of the hip. In her current state of health, she was not a candidate for the only treatment available — hip replacement surgery. Without the surgery, the amount of pain that she would experience daily was far more than the debilitating pain that she had already been experiencing for the last 5 years. Her body was failing her, and she knew it.
On Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019, she was in horrible pain. Dad was yelling at her over this or that. He wanted her to take care of him, but she could not. She was experiencing a health crisis of her own. She took painkillers every day. She took blood thinners following a minor stroke 16 years earlier. She took diuretics following an unnecessary cancer surgery years earlier, where they removed her lymph nodes in her legs. Her son (me) had just spent a day with her 2 weeks earlier. Her daughter and her son-in-law had just left 3 days before. She had been hinting for more than a year; she did not know how much more she could take. Until May 23rd, 2019 we did not understand what that meant.
About 6 pm or 7 pm on May 22nd, she had had enough. She would not see her kids again for weeks. Her husband of 66 years was going to be her only companion, and he was constantly badgering her to fix his meals, to do this, or do that for him. We know that they were fighting that day too.
We believe that Mom went into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet to go to the bathroom and just became overwhelmed with it all. She gave up. She had a stroke. With the blood thinners in her body, the bleeding on her brain did not stop. Dad said that he found her on the toilet, but she told him to leave her alone. We think she was still fighting with him and she had had enough. He went somewhere else in the house and fell asleep. Hours later, sometime in the middle of the night, he found her still on the toilet and talking in gibberish. He called the ambulance. We know that she arrived at the hospital at 3:52 am. She was still in her street clothes. In other words, she was not dressed for bed, so she had not been to bed. The police officer showed up to take Dad to the hospital around 6:30 am. We can only guess at what happened between 6 pm May 22nd and 3:52 am May 23rd.
My sister called me just before 11 am.
In our hunt for answers as we pieced together the timeline, something else amazing happened.
After 66 years of marriage to a man, who believed that anybody who believed in God, was an imbecile, my Mom had not lost her faith in God. Mom recognized that her body was failing her, and she told my sister that she was excited and looking forward to going to Heaven. Mom was at peace with her impending death. That knowledge has brought me indescribable peace.
It turned out, that my sister found faith 40+ years ago too. Only I was stuck, faithless, under Dad’s thumb. They recognized a long time ago that Dad was not always right. My younger sister learned what to avoid with Dad by watching how he treated me.
Those trips to Sunday school, 50 years ago, were Mom’s attempts to introduce us to the Lord, whom she knew and loved. She sold the idea to Dad by suggesting that we need to at least know about God. It would help us to communicate with others as we grew up. Dad had agreed.