This may seem a bit dark, but I imagine most of us have wondered how our parents' eventual ending might be.
With my dad, I was certain for many years that his passing would involve something dramatic, perhaps a rolled-over tractor or a fall from a roof or a leap in front of a bullet to save a stray cat. He wasn’t one to dodge risky endeavors.
Yet, his end was quiet. It came in April 2022 while he was seated in a wheelchair near a nursing station.
Since our parents were seldom apart, we sort of expected Mom wouldn’t last long after Dad, yet she kept going, becoming tinier and tinier, until it seemed she might disappear altogether.
For a time, she seemed content with her stacks of books and magazines, but at some point, reading became lost to her. Then, she had her "Bonanza" and "Gun Smoke," until following storylines became too much as well, and so she mostly just slept. She would come out for meals, but only with a bit of prodding.
She hated the idea of being a bother, so I expected she would find a way to go in her sleep; that she would simply slip away in the middle of the night, and I would get a call from my brother to let me know it had happened.
Instead, a fall while in respite care for a week left her with a head wound. At first, she seemed to be bouncing back well, until she suddenly wasn’t. By the time Don, Celeste, and I arrived at my brother and sister-in-law’s home in Kent, Ohio, where she and Dad moved in 2018, Mom was fully unresponsive.
When I walked into her room, my brother was stretched out beside her in the hospital bed, holding her hand while talking to her. It was so touching to see him that way. Like me, Kurt tends to search for the humor even when that sort of thing might not be considered appropriate, but this was my brother as a little boy again, not a quick-to-joke man.
When Kurt went outside for a bit, it was my turn to crawl in bed with Mom.
I wish I could say that she knew we were there, and maybe she did, but there was never a physical indication. Her mouth was open in a big O. We took turns swabbing to help with the dryness. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t swallow.
She was taking only four breaths a minute. Sometimes just three. Her blood pressure was too low to register.
It was the husk of my mom. The shell she used to inhabit. Her heart kept going long enough for everyone to see her one last time. Family drifted in and out. Even my unofficial brother, Gale Harman, and his wife Jodie were able to get there in time to say goodbye.
Most of my life, I lived in fear of the day I’d lose Mom. There was a time almost 30 years ago when Mom had cancer, that I remember fervently praying she would survive and live long enough for me to go first because I couldn’t bear the thought of life without her. Yet to see her like she was at the end — I couldn’t want her to linger that way any longer.
That wasn’t life. And Mom had always known how to live it.
Up until a few months ago, whenever Mom wheeled her walker into a room, she would do so while singing, “Here she is … Miss America.†And then, when she left, she would switch to, “So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, goodbye†from "The Sound of Music."
That song has been stuck in my head for a week.
I hear it sung in her voice.
Which is actually easy to do, since my brother recorded Mom singing it a few months back and then shared the video with all of us via text not long after she passed.
Some might think that wasn’t appropriate, but those who swim in her gene pool know she would approve.