My Mom

When I said time was short in my last post, I was more accurate than I thought. My Mom is gone. She passed away at 1:45 am on Tuesday August 24. My sister and I were there when she went.

My sister got a call from the nurse at the home on Monday afternoon to say that Mom was unresponsive and lethargic, and they were taking her to the hospital. She called me at work and said to meet her there. We were at the Alex just after 4pm, and they had taken her right into a trauma room. Her breathing was labored, and she had a fever. They were worried about an infection, but didn't elaborate at that time.

Turns out the pneumonia she had the week before hadn't cleared up entirely, and had turned into Sepsis, which is an infection that affects your whole system. Her organs shut down, and it was a matter of keeping her comfortable until the end. They kept her on fluids, and made sure they honored her wishes regarding her care; she didn't want to live on a machine, full of tubes. We made her comfortable and stayed with her until she was gone. The staff in the emergency department was so good to us. They found us a private room that we could stay in with Mom and they checked on us every so often, but didn't really intrude. The Doctor that was on call said she was impressed that we had discussed this, since she sees a lot of families that don't, and when she came to make the pronouncement said that she felt we had all carried out Mom's directive just as she would have wanted.

This isn't the goodbye part, her celebration on Tuesday will take care of that. And it's not really goodbye, it's Until we meet again. So i'm going to listen to my Christmas cd's today (because my Mom always listened to Christmas music in the summer to feel cooler), and remember her turning them up so everyone could hear them. And I do mean EVERYONE. ("is that christmas music playing?" "Where's it coming from?" "Oh Doreen is playing her records again ..!" "Doesn't she know it's July ??")

I love you Mom. xoxo