It can be both

Exploring life's impermanence

Trigger warning: This essay describes being present during my mother's final breaths. My experience of this was profound and one of peace, however, I am aware that reading this piece might bring up things for the reader.

I was reaching to put the star on the Christmas tree when I got the call. I dropped the star. We never finished decorating the tree that year. Every year since as I reach to put the star on top of the tree, I remember the phone call, the way the star dropped out of my hand and hit the floor, the way the headlights cut through the dark as I sped down the country lane and was there at Mum’s side within three minutes.

Mum was in the hospital bed in the downstairs bedroom aka the dining room, which we converted into a bedroom some months earlier when she was no longer able to go up the stairs. She shared the room with Dad. Two single beds. Her bed had buttons to move it every which way. I remember when it arrived. We all looked at it silently thinking the same thing… ‘death bed.’ My dear friend, who had been so supportive explaining all things palliative and what she went through with her own Dad, referred to the bed as a sandwich maker. The name stuck. I preferred it.

The dark brown wooden dresser on the wall in my parents' room was no longer filled with the faded blue and white plates and brown bowls inherited from generations of old, instead, now, there were photos of us and the grandchildren. The newly hung homemade Christmas decorations her ‘Wander Women’ (Mum’s wonderful friends who she went walking with) had hung up a few days before. In the far corner the old-fashioned drinks cabinet, at the end of the bed, the television.

Arriving at Mum’s side, holding her hand, kneeling. She had told us the day before “I think I am going to die today” (and when I say told, I mean typed into her iPad), we knew it was coming.

I noticed the colour fading from her skin before the breath stopped. It was all strange and beautiful and devastating and magical at once. It felt as if she died in our arms somehow. We all had our hands on her and we were telling her how much we loved her.

Dad felt her chest probably 6 or 7 times during the following 4 hours or so we stayed with her in the room, he kept saying “Mum’s passed away hasn’t she?” and holding her hand. We didn’t know how much he would comprehend what was happening due to his dementia.

I stayed with Mum, my knees pressing against the carpet. I kept talking to her. The tears falling. I was holding her hand, her skin was cold. I had felt the warmth leave her body.

I helped Dad slowly take off her silver strand necklace with her wedding rings on. When she became ill and her fingers started to get paralysed, she could no longer wear these on her hands.

I felt an extraordinary sense of relief. The last few months she had been saying she was ready to go and this was her moment. I wasn’t expecting to feel relief. I felt joy. I wasn’t expecting to feel joy. I felt expansion.

So this is death.

The ambulance crew didn’t call the time of death like they do in the films. The female paramedic was crouching by the end of the bed. She stepped back. She said “I am so sorry. Would you like us to give you some space?” And they stepped out. I don’t remember who took the equipment off.

I remember saying thank you. I remember one of them picking up what looked like a long black box from the end of the bed. They moved to the kitchen and I didn’t see them again.

I felt a depth of loss that made me want to throw up on the spot. As if I could no longer inhabit my body without my mother. Like Mum was my gravity and she was gone. She was my person. Does this mean that she is no longer my person? Can she still be my person now she is dead?

The ground was the only place I could be.

Sinking into the ground in despair and simultaneously elated that Mum got to leave her failing, painful body as she had been telling us for months she so desperately wanted to. Back in October she had even called a meeting with her palliative care team saying she wanted to stop food and using her ventilator.

So it can be both.

How could it be both?

Could it be that I had already been grieving her for the 15 months since her diagnosis? Could it be that somehow I was prepared for this moment, though I thought I never could be?

I remember the moment in my childhood bedroom, three days after Mum’s diagnosis, as I lay on the floor trying to do some yoga I kept having images of giving birth to our youngest child Ayla 7 months earlier. I wrote about it in my journal:

“Those moments when we touch the edge of life and our skin comes off. Birth and death. Raw, real, fierce. Moving beyond the pain. Labour resist resist resist and pain pain pain pummelled with pain and then there was the moment of surrender. Allowing. Accepting. Hours where I I felt no pain. I didn’t even know when the contractions were happening. When I resist the wave in contrast to those moments of accepting, where I could transcend it. How to experience that state in grief I don’t know… Perhaps there is no place to get to. No framework to follow. No magical book to read. It is just being with what is, and what is isn’t clear-cut. It can be many things at once. So many things at once.” (Sept. 10th 2021)

I arrived home in the early hours of the morning having sat with Mum’s body for hours. I was struck by the beauty of the moon. The same moon we had gathered in the drive to look at when we were getting in the car at my parent’s place earlier that evening, not knowing that that would be the night Mum would die. She died on a red moon rising. Winter solstice.

I stood in the moonlight. Not ready to cross the threshold of going into our little cottage, with Stuart asleep upstairs, Ayla in her cot and Remmy in his little bed with the pink mesh thing tucked under his mattress that stopped him from falling out.

Photo of the moon the night Mum died, 21st December 2021

If I stepped through the door it would be true that Mum had died, so I stayed in the frosty night, looking through the shadowy branches of the tree by our front door, I spoke to the moon, as if she were Mum. Asking how she was, where she was and telling her my experiences of the last few hours. The clothes we dressed her in, the purple and green earrings I put in for her, and the way they shone.

This was the beginning of six months of communing with the moon every night and telling her everything I would have told Mum.

I tiptoed upstairs, first checking on both the kids, who were of course fast asleep. I went to brush my teeth. It felt weird to brush my teeth and my mother be dead. This is the first time I am brushing my teeth without having a mother who is alive. I took off my clothes and climbed into bed naked and pressed my cold body against Stuart's, spooning him. I was struck by the warmth of his body, the rhythm of his breath. To press my skin against his felt exquisite. How is it that I hadn’t realised the magic of a human breathing body before? I was in awe at his capacity to be alive and in a body. He is alive. I get to be alive. I felt exalted.

In contrast to the coldness of Mum's skin, the simplicity of her not breathing. There was no breath.

Here there was breath. In this bed, there was breath, there was warmth.

He woke. I don’t remember words. We are all bodies breathing, until we are not. I felt changed forever, that somehow I had stood at the edge of death, even though it was not my own, and now I will never be the same again.

I just held onto him. Silent tears fell as he held me and I oscillated between elation and relief that Mum’s pain and suffering was finally over and the sheer devastation of how I could possibly function as a human being without my Mum. How could I possibly mother without my own?

And yet a remarkable sense that comes in waves that she is absolutely not gone, she is in with me, in every pore of my being.

As I write, I touch my Mum’s wedding rings, now around my right thumb and I plant a small kiss on them. I feel a profound depth of loss at her no longer being physically here and I am simultaneously flooded with gratitude and a sense of vitality as I remember her, feel her presence and connect with the extraordinary impermanence of life.

It can be both. It can be both.

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I am new to Substack and I am new to my writing being read. I have been writing in snatches of 15 minutes a day for almost 5 years now, and before that a couple of decades of morning pages and countless notebooks. However, until recently this writing has been invisible, I decided this year is my year to be bold so here I am showing up! I hope to use Substack to explore and reflect on motherhood, grief, joy, awe, beauty, the landscapes of human emotions and needs… life’s wild edges. I would love to hear from you about moments of holding paradox, of grief, of life’s great transitions, feeling deeply, or just to hear if anything in this post resonated. I am also a therapist and a grief coach, and you can find out more about my work here: https://ritualsforbeing.com/

Thank you so much for reading.