Good Grief

My mother is gone. As I sit beside her lifeless, but not-yet cold body on the third floor of St. John’s General in these first few minutes of her death, all I feel is my own life energy. My heart is thumping loudly, pulsing in my neck and throbbing in my head. Perhaps these are the effects of too much caffeine and a sleepless night, but still. My vibrancy overpowers everything in the room. The chair, rolling table, life-monitoring machines are immobile and silent, and my mother’s body now joins them, her liveliness of a few moments before reduced to body weight taking up space.

I look at her and it seems as if she is already sinking into the bed, becoming one with sheets and mattress, now yielding to gravity’s pull, down, down, down. We always shared everything and for the first time in my life, I feel the huge chasm between us. I am incapable of knowing anything about the experience of dying and how can I, with the relentless thump, thump, thump of my own heart beating out the rhythm of life.

I can’t stand it. I plead with my own body to just stop- let go of life, quiet down, but life can’t help but be exuberant. It’s in the very definition of what it is to be alive. At this moment, I no longer want to be along for that ride. I just can’t do exuberance right now.

They come in to take her body to the morgue. “It is time,” they say.

I want to tell them that time is no longer an issue in this eternal void I now find myself in, but I know most likely that they need the room for another patient, so I acquiesce with a couple of words and what I think is a brave smile. Probably to them it looks like pain.

My mom is whisked away and for a second, I have no idea where I should be, what I should be doing next or even how to get out of the hospital. That is when I notice them. A pair of sunglasses are sitting on a small table in the corner. Did someone leave them there? I pick them up and look them over to see if they are familiar. Have I seen anyone wearing these? In the constant stream of visitors, hospice dulas and medical staff, I can’t remember seeing anyone with sunglasses.

I put them on and they are strangely comforting. I turn and take a few steps to look in the small bathroom mirror. I recognize my face, but I am shocked to see that it has changed overnight. I note the pasty white skin and hollow cheeks. With these glasses on, I see my resemblance to my mother in her last months of illness. Is this me now? Am I dying too?

A doctor’s face joins mine in the mirror. I quickly remove the glasses and shoot him a questioning look. “Grief glasses. They are yours. Wear them as needed.” Before I can ask anything, he leaves as abruptly as he came and I watch him as his self-important gait disappears down to the end of the hall and around the corner.

I stand for a moment in disbelief, then turn back to the mirror and put the glasses back on. The lenses are heavily smoked, significantly dulling the bright fluorescent lighting of the room. I relax and take a breath. A gentle voice in my head is repeating the Buddhist mantra which had always given my mother comfort, “Om mani padme hum”. It sounds so much like my mother’s voice intoning the ancient syllables which are said to awaken wisdom and compassion and protect against negative energy. I don’t believe in any of it, but, like my mother always said, “What can it hurt?”

There is a Code Blue announcement in the hallway and the running of medical staff past the open doorway, bringing me abruptly back to the moment. I pull the glasses off and throw them onto the table. “I am stronger than that! What do I need glasses for?”

I summon the grit which got me through a multitude of breakups and a master’s in business admin., willing myself to move. In a disconnected flurry of activity, I open a bag and put my mother’s belongings in it. My hands do not rest on the soft fabric of her cardigan and my nose refuses to recognize the scent of her perfume that still lingers there. I am not saddened by the half-finished paperback or the cotton socks I gave her on her last birthday. I condense all the flowers to one bundle and stick the end in a plastic bag. I grab my things: a book, my laptop and a sweater and stuff them unceremoniously into my work bag. I throw the bag over my shoulder and grab the rest with two strong arms.

I stop just before the threshold of the door. I can’t do it. I can’t leave. What if they made a mistake? What if she is really not dead and they bring her back here? I can’t believe that this is real. Maybe I will wake up in a moment and realize that I have been dreaming, that I am at home in my childhood room, in that twin bed that is now a little small but still so comfortable.

My thinking brain gets the upper hand for half a second. I tell myself that it is true. Mom had a disease, her body couldn’t work anymore and she died. I am blinking back tears and I set my bags down to grab a tissue. After a few deep breaths, I glance around to see that I have everything and my eyes connect with ten lacquered toes on my feet. I am not wearing shoes.

I remember taking them off the night before, curled up in the large stuffed chair. The image strikes me as a little pathetic and selfish. Mom was dying and I needed to be comfortable. I needed to sleep. Should I not have foregone my own comfort just this once; held her hand every second of every ragged breath? Sometimes I counted them. But I don’t think I fully realized that there would be a moment in the time continuum when she would exhale and just not inhale again. Never again.

I find my shoes shoved under the chair. They are fancy looking pumps with embossed flowers in the surface of smooth tan leather. I remember how professional and feminine I felt the first day I wore them to the office; a woman making a difference in a man’s world. I thought I was doing something heroic with my life. Maybe instead of staying secure and smug inside my inflated ego-bubble, I should have been with Mom. When she got the cancer diagnosis, why didn’t I move home? I could have taken care of her instead of watching from an eight hundred and forty-six mile vantage point as she faced the illness and the chemo on her own. I always said it was the timing. I had just landed my dream job and felt finally, on the cusp of forty, that I had “made it”. Mom always asked me when I was coming home and I did, for a weekend here and there, but now I realize that it wasn’t enough, that she understood her mortality and I obviously did not. It could have made a difference. She might still be here with me.

I slip into my shoes and walk over to the window which faces onto a heavily treed park. It is intended to be a beautiful, serene view, but I don’t see it.

The sunlight, the twittering of birds, the electric green of the foliage are all too bright, too loud, too alive. I quickly turn back to the room, but it is too quiet, too still. It is painted in the colors of death and my heart is still beating out of my chest in denial. My body is in some kind of cruel diametric sensory overload. Maybe I’ll just explode? Or rather implode, I decide. It’s less messy.

It is all too much for one young and stupid human being to handle. I’m not sure how I am to go on without my mother, endlessly cheerful, optimistically rooting for me at every turn of my little life. I look again at the door and realize that I don’t want to leave. Things will change forever when I walk through that door.

I put my hand to my back pocket, thinking that to calm my nerves I will get AI to talk me down from my tree with all the logical reasons I would be feeling this way, except my phone isn’t there. In a panic, I grab my work bag and pull things out frantically searching for it. Have I lost it? Did I leave it on the gurney?

All my belongings are now sitting on the rolling table including some hospital paperwork and a half-eaten cafeteria muffin. In the inside pocket I thankfully latch on to my phone and as I do, I realize that there is something else there as well: the glasses, the grief glasses, the ones the doctor said were mine to wear as needed.

I sit down in the chair, suddenly feeling the bone-deep exhaustion of the past few days and I put them on. Immediately a veil descends on the room and what was too much to bear a mere second ago becomes muted and cool. My brain is slowing down until only one thing comes into focus at a time. Put things back into the work bag. Scan the room. Say good bye.

Tears well up as I relax and finally accept the gift of grief to dampen and mute, allowing the time and space for me to feel and to heal. I close my eyes and find myself slowly floating into blessed unconsciousness.

Gentle nudges of a nurse with eyes smiling overtop a white mask, bring me gently back to awareness . Have I only just closed my eyes an instant or has it been hours?

“Can I help you get your things to the elevator?” she offers.

I nod, slowly get to my feet, and take hold of my work bag. The nurse grabs the flowers and plastic bag of belongings. I scan the room. The sunglasses are sitting on the armrest of the chair. I pick them up with gratitude and put them on. Then, one step at a time, I walk out the door.

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