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Permalink Reply by Sue Waxman on May 11, 2012 at 7:00am

My mom passed on June 26, 2011. She and I shared the same birthday Dec 19th. We were very, very close and spent everyweekend doing something. She was diagnosed with throat cancer and was taken within 1 year. I watched her suffer beyond belief. It changed me forever. There is not one thing than can touch my heart any more deeply than watching what she endured. Mother's Day, the last one with her, she was to sick to eat the dinner I prepared. I was kind of mad at her for not trying. I have so many regrets over trying to push her to do things she just was uncapable of doing. I wanted her to live. The cancer just robbed her of her body. Before she passed she told me how proud she was of me. I am in denial a lot. It is a place I go so I don't just cry all of the time. Mother's Day will be a horrible day for us. I miss her every minute of my life and look forward to my own passing to be reunited with her and my other family members. My faith in God keeps me from making today my last day. Our mothers would ask us to be happy if they had that opportunity. It's so hard isn't it? My life is very empty. Your friend Sue

Permalink Reply by Erica Garcia SanMiguel on May 11, 2012 at 7:56am

ugh I hate this feeling the anxiety has started last night again. I felt like just running and never looking back the events of the last day with my mom just replayed in my head over and aver again. I pray that god sends me the strength to get through this weekend. 

Permalink Reply by Mary on May 13, 2012 at 6:06pm

This has been a miserable day.  My own children have not even wished me a Happy Mothers Day, my mom is not here for me to spend Mothers Day with and I couldn't even go get flowers and out them on her grave because it was pouring rain, my van was acting up, and it was too muddy to get to her spot in the cemetery.  I don't want to talk to anyone because they all keep saying the same thing-"I know this is hard for you", they have no idea how hard it is.

Permalink Reply by Judy on June 3, 2012 at 1:36pm

I was fortunate to live to be 65 years old and to have experienced only the deaths of my grandfather (when I was 12) and my grandmother (when I was 39). Now, I am trying rather unsuccessfully to deal with the unexpected loss of my mother. Even though she was 86, and I should have realized that she couldn't live forever, I thought she was still healthy.

Because I was also dealing, for the first time, with a beloved dog dying too young of cancer, my parents kept my mother's chest pains to themselves until after I had euthanized my dog. As a result, four days after I put Riley down (on April 30), my dad called to tell me that my mother had been hospitalized with 90% left coronary and 95% right coronary blockage. I left the next morning. Mother's only choices were to go home and die, probably within 10 days, or to undergo bypass surgery. We were given mixed messages about the surgery by different staff members, and while the surgeon assessed her risk of stroke at only 30%, he said that she was definitely a high-risk patient.

She had the surgery on the 9th. It did not go well, but the surgeon said she apparently wanted to live as her heart had failed twice and she came back each time. However, during the surgery he taken her off of the heart-lung bypass machine when he discovered that one of the arteries was not perfusing properly. So, her had to put her back on the machine and re-anesthetize her to do the repair. Bad business, that.

 

On Mother's Day, she still had not woken up. For three days we watched her struggle with horrible pain. On Friday, they put her on propofol, and she never moved again. A CAT-scan had been done the day before Mother's Day, but no one had told us of any results. So, on Mother's Day, thinking she could still hear me, I told her what a wonderful mother she was, how fortunate I felt to have her as my mother, that we were waiting for her to wake up, and how much I loved her. I sobbed and sobbed.

The next day, an RN we had never seen before in the ICU told us of the extent of the strokes. There had been four massive ones (front, back, and both sides) and a smaller one in her brain stem. The only one of her doctors on duty that Monday after Mother's Day was the pulmonologist, who had already made rounds. The RN called her to come back to talk to us. The pulmonologist said that my mother probably would never wake up, and even if she did, she would have zero quality of life. So, we had to watch as the staff pulled life support at our request as that was what my mother wanted.

I am a mess, and I don't know how I can ever live through another Mother's Day with all that happened around that usually happy day. I never got to give her the gift and card I had brought with me. It never even occurred to me that she would never wake up.

 

I totally "get" what you wrote, Jennifer. That void you write of is unbearably painful... And to my mother, too, I say, "I love you so much, Mama."

 

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