...when a person with cancer is nearing death. Handy Google finished my search query for me in an incredibly sad way tonight as I sat by my mother's bedside and watched her morphine induced sleep. I was led to this article on the American Cancer Society's website where I realized I had observed every bullet point on the list for mother in the last few days.
This weekend kicked off Friday with me blubbering all over mother, and then she asked me to pray for her and so I did that, too. I had been holding it together pretty well up to that point since her stage 4 diagnosis in April 2020. I've been on and off weepy as her treatments were stopped and her health declined, but never in front of her. Friday I just hit the wall of unrelenting anticipatory grief and there was no more denying the fact that she'd be leaving this earthly life sooner than she or I wanted.
And yet I couldn't shake my fist at God for a life cut short. Mother worked hard to scratch items off her life's bucket list in the last couple decades. She has done so many wonderful things. Seen so many amazing places. And has made so many precious memories with friends and family over the years. It was a life well lived. So I sucked up the gut punch of grief I couldn't ignore, that she would be gone soon while the world keeps turning and life continues to roll along for those of us left behind. The lament of children, even the middle-aged ones, when they lose a beloved parent.
After a bit of a breakdown Friday, I put on the armor of God and got through Saturday. Mother had perked up some and we even chuckled a bit about the paranoid imaginings she recalled. This morning she seemed a bit distracted and at lunch it was worse. By the time I saw her again at 5:30 in anticipation of helping her with dinner, she didn't recognize me or my younger daughter.
Symbolic of a life winding down, I turned off her iPad and stored it in a drawer. Then I turned off the ringer on her phone and didn't plug it in to charge. She told me yesterday she couldn't remember how to call me on her phone, and that also speaks volumes about where she's at with her terminal cancer. When I went to put away her iPad that has kept her connected with family and friends for years now, I spied these two items below on her nightstand and took a quick pic. That's my mother's mother (granny) taken way back when she was a young woman right before World War II. That little sign is something mother picked up several years ago.
So here I am again, more than 20 years after my granny passed, wanting to dig in my heels and bury my head in the sand at the inevitable pain that's barreling towards me. But I'm stronger than that thanks to my faith. The Lord is holding me in the palm of His hand down this road I'm walking with my mother and I praise Him for it. I have no idea how unbelievers find the strength to get through the grief of a loss like this. And praise God that I won't have to find out because I'm leaning into Him in complete trust to find comfort and peace in the coming weeks and months.
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