What a privilege it has been to be at the side of the person who guided me into this world. And who is now making her way out of our world into another.
What a privilege it has been to be her champion and advocate, to have fiercely guarded and guided her and to have embraced with love, respect and gratitude the time I have had with my mother in the final phase of her life.
Just a short year ago, I offered my mother a vacation from the locked dementia ward she found herself living in after a steep six month decline in her health. She accepted the week with trepidation and when offered, chose to stay with me in our small cottage home with two large dogs and a garden.
The journey we have taken together has been filled with such lessons and discoveries. I have found a capacity within myself that I did not know existed. Our lives slowed down together, became inter twined and vastly more complicated. We forge and grew a new relationship as an adult daughter and parent partner. Our trust deepened. She came to know me as the woman I had become and I to appreciate her and her experience. I worked each day to make it her best and organized myself for any unexpected challenge that comes with care giving. I helped to enrich her world with the intention of giving back all the love she poured into our family and found myself enriched.
We shared moments of pain, shouldered the hardships together, and grew a community. I learned how to ask for and accept help. I would do it again one hundred times over.
Both my mother, Betsi and I talked about death (almost daily) and I thought I had envisioned all the scenarios. But the biggest lesson of all is that there is so much that we don’t control. And life will happen and not always to plan.
My family and I sit at Betsi’s bedside watching her wrestle with the last of her life. She didn’t die of the sudden heart failure that we anticipated but is failing from a fall. As I sorted through all of the very difficult decisions and while my mother was lucid briefed her of our choices (all awful and awful) she said for the umpteenth time, “You are forever the optimist.” I wish could throw a ‘hail mary’ pass and buy us some more time together.
I have not taken this journey with any one. I am not an expert on love and loss. I am just forever changed by the experience.
What a privilege!
Leslie
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