Suicide

[MagnetMan]

Her last days…


My sister and I came into her room morning after morning and came face to face with her frustration. Frustration over being immobilized and wedged in this limbo. Frustration with our blind denial that she was dying and our assurances that all she needed to do was rest, that it would pass and she would heal.

The morning I found her on the floor after having fallen trying to reach the porta-potty next to her bed, I knew that her strength was failing. It was terrifying seeing her lying there. Such an alien picture to see the strongest woman I knew, unable to pick herself up. She needed us to help her onto it from then on.

There were accidents, and we would wash her and try to make her feel clean and dignified. She couldn’t stand it. After looking after her own paralyzed mother for so long, she couldn’t stand that we had to look after her now, even if it had only been a few days as opposed to the decade plus that she had been care giving.

One time, after coming in too late to find that she had needed to use her porta-potty, after cleaning her up I cried quietly and whispered to her, “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry. I should have checked on you sooner.” She grabbed my hand and shook her head. “I hate this. I want to die. I can’t make you guys do this. It’s not fair to you.” “No,” I said to her, “This is nothing. Please, this is nothing.”

She was not afraid of dying. She was at peace with that. Her only fear was how she could facilitate it. She speculated over the possibilities. She tried to think of what would be easiest for us. It was morbid. In my un-resigned mind, I would have none of it. She would become concerned then… She would say that she was ok, and that she needed us to be at peace with it.

One morning I came in to find her lying on her side in her bed. When she looked at me, the look in her eyes was confused and uncertain. I found half a dozen of her pain prescription bottles empty in the trash. I knew that she must have tried to kill herself that night. I was so scared, she taken so many pills. As I shakily collected the bottles out of the trash looking them over, I noticed one of them wasn’t empty. Absently I set it on the bedside table. As weak and drugged as she was she managed to reach over and snatch the bottle and angrily throw it forcefully back in the trash. I was so surprised by what seemed such a bizarre thing to do, and with such determination, I let out a confused little laugh. She didn’t say anything though. I didn’t take it back out again but I peered in to the bin and read the label. Only then did I realize that that bottle wasn’t sleeping pills or pain killer. It was her chemo medicine. She whispered hoarsely “How are you supposed to do this? What are you supposed to do? I can’t breathe, I can’t move, I can’t sit, or sleep, or eat. I don’t understand why I’m still here. I can’t live and I won’t die.”

She had talked only a couple days before, kind of incredulously, about the young Australian actor, Keith Ledger, who had died just a few months previous by an accidental overdose and how he was so young and vital and so full of promise. She wondered at how he died so easily… Lying peacefully on his bed, so accidentally gone. And here she was having taken handfuls of pills, trying to leave it all behind, and yet still she would awake, imprisoned in the torture chamber her body had become. This of course added fuel to my argument. In my blind refusal and fearful arrogance I would almost scold her, telling her that that must mean she’s not supposed to die. That it wasn’t her time.

But slowly the hooks I’d felt lodged in my chest, a kind of invisible giant of immense ache that we all tried to bury, finally began to fully realize itself and leave my mind nowhere to hide. It was a feeling that had been there since the first day she told me of the lump that she’d felt. From then on, when I looked at her, stripped now of all illusions, all I saw was the terrible cruelty that this world was subjecting her to, making her continue on when everything this world had to offer was now perched beyond her reach.

Finally came my tearful halting confession as I kneeled by her bedside: I stammered that “If that is what you want… I’ll find a way… I’ll get something...” and I trailed off so unsure and unfamiliar with what I was saying. She stared at me perplexed. “What will you get? How will you get it?” “I don’t know…. morphine… something… I’ll break into the ambulance if I have to.” She looked at me a little surprised. Maybe she hadn’t thought of that possibility before. But she was unwilling to ask that of me or of anyone. And so the offer went by, without anymore said.

My sister and I sat with her, mostly in silence, both of us not knowing what to say. Usually she would shoo us away, telling us off only half-jokingly for being such a grim and gloomy bunch. She’d long since taken to calling me McWeepy, for not being able to keep myself in check.

Anytime I’d try to speak of things I’d wished I’d done, or said, she would always cut me off and shake her head, refusing to let me speak in those terms, one time stating to me that she had no room for regrets and that I had better not either.

She said there was nothing to be said. She said all that mattered was that she loved us and that she knew we loved her. That was it, nothing else mattered. It was a stunning kind of reality for me. She was so peaceful when she spoke those words. So matter of fact, so knowing. I couldn’t quite accept it. Could not quite wrap my brain around the fact that every material thing in this world that everyone agonizes over and analyzes and cares about and strives for… were suddenly gone. Not just irrelevant or meaningless, but not even there, as if they never existed. The only thing you take with you is love, anything else, on any plane other than this earthly one, simply disappears, as if it never was.

The next morning, when I came into see her, she whispered to me to please call the doctor, that he would give us something. Outside her room, my sister and I collapsed into tears once more as we had done so many times before in that very spot. Brett looked at me and said grief and fright in her voice, “You know what she’ll do, right? We have to get it. I have to do this for her. She doesn’t want it for pain, you know that, right?” I knew that.

I called the doctor. I told him, without actually telling, what was happening. He knew. He said we needed to make her comfortable. He said he would prescribe morphine for her. My sister left only a few moments after I got off the phone and drove the 180 mile round trip to Bishop to get that bottle from the pharmacy. I went to her room and told her that Brett had gone to get it… that it would only be a few hours more, now. That it was coming. She nodded without saying a word, relief filling her eyes before they closed and she slipped into the shallow fitful sleep that had been the only crumb of relief she had been able to have for so long.

She woke up over and over in the next few hours, asking again and again where Brett was. She’s coming, she’s on her way…..

When Brett finally did return in the early evening, she only gave her the prescribed amount of morphine for pain. But when I said goodnight to her that night, inside I knew it would be the last time I spoke to her. Letting go that night was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Prepared for it as I was in the past days, still those few moments before she fell asleep as I tucked her in like I had many times, were brutally heart breaking. I lay for awhile with my head resting on her shoulder. I told her I loved her. She smiled and mouthed the words back to me, her voice no longer audible.

The next morning when we came into see her, she was not awake. She lay on her side unconscious. Her face was very pale and her breathing was shallow.

I stood there, off to the side next to my Dad as her body took its final breaths. The sound after that last tiny out-breath left a deafening silence. My mind went blank as the tears just flowed down my face. My Dad hugged me tight and said that she was gone. I wanted to close my eyes and look away from the face that was not hers anymore. All the light of her was gone. My Dad told me to go tell the others. As I walked down the hall, I was numb and stunned. When I saw my sister, she knew instantly from whatever she saw in my face. I kept walking as she passed me. I found my brother in the next room. He looked at me and I blurted that she was gone. His eyes were clear and hurt. He hugged me and everything came crashing in. The sound that came from me was out of my control. It felt as though I were outside my body watching myself.

I will always love you mom
Kat.