What I Did This Summer

About 18 years ago, I lay in bed next to my husband on a quiet fall night. The room was dark, and we were in that comfortable silent mode while we waited together for sleep to come. It was then that I spoke the words that had been brewing in my heart for several weeks. 

“I don’t want my mom to die,” I said quietly, feeling like a petulant child who hates her Sunday shoes and wants to wear flip flops to church instead; frustrated and impotent.

The cancer, however, was relentless and irrationally insistent. I knew what was inevitable, and over the weeks that followed, mom and I talked about all of it; life and death, the irreverent and the sacred, the real and the fantasy, and in those phone conversations we said all the loving and trusting words that a mother and daughter might want to say to one another before  goodbye.

And even so, she slipped away sooner than I had imagined and before I could get there to say it all in person. I don’t blame myself for that, or her, but there are moments when I wish for a do-over.

I have missed her these nearly 18 years, and sometimes I have wished she were here to laugh with or to play piano for, or to watch her enjoy her amazing grandkids.

I have never wished she were here more than I do now, as I watch my father dying. 

I want her here so that she can tend to his needs, and help him feel comfortable. I want her here to make their home clean and warm and filled with music and the smell of delicious food. I want her here to hear her laugh with him, and talk with him, and remember all their years together.

I don’t mind that it’s me fixing him lunch so he doesn’t have to do it himself, or that I’m the one worrying over his schedule or trying to organize the office that has run terribly amok over the last years. I just know that it’s not the same, and I wish she were here to help him feel like the world around him has some sort of order to it while he adjusts to letting go of all the things that have held him here for 97 years.

He’s not afraid, and neither am I. We’re pretty sure about what comes next ... except that neither of us have done this before, so we really know nothing at all.

I watch him struggle as he feels his body failing him, for this cancer is just as relentless, with no regard for treatments he was sure would buy him back the time he always imagined he would always have. 

As he holds my hand and tells me what a gift I am to him, speaking words weighted with love for his life and his children and his work and his world, I know the truth that he speaks and sense the genuine gratitude he has worn like a cloak his entire life. 

He insists on being grateful even as his world unravels with his health. His thoughts and his words are all about how his loved ones will manage when he is gone. If it were possible, he would surely counsel each of us daily from the other side, and I can sense his desperation as he sees that window of opportunity closing around him.

I don’t know how to help him let go, or how to convince him that he gave us all that we have needed him to give. It is enough. He can put down the bags he has carried for us - it’s time for him to move forward, and this part of the journey he must begin alone.

We’ll be here on this side, and mom and others are waiting joyfully on the other side to see his face and take his hand again. I know how happy he will be when he gets to see the end from the beginning for the first time. I guess that in the end, I really am glad that she is there for him. Maybe she was the brave one to face the passage first, and needed to be there to help him in the letting go. 

Come to think of it, that would be just exactly like her. I’ll bet she’s got the bed freshly made and the place spotless, just for him. They have so much to talk about after 18 years.