my mother has an expiration date

[sightseer 895]

My mom just turned 80.  She's had congestive heart failure for a while now. (she's had a great many health problems along the way).

She randomly gets extremely tired and, if she's out in public(mostly), an ambulance is called.  The heart doctor either replaced or repaired a valve a while back and not too long ago we thought they might need to do  that again but the doctor has basically said that nothing can be done.

The main muscle of her heart is working less and less over time.  Her 'heart function' was at 35% in January and just the other day (sh'es in the hospital now), they said it was down to 20%.

I'm finding it hard to digest.

I just needed to write this.  it is what it is I suppose.

[romanus 28]

Sorry to hear that. Both of my parents are gone. It was many years ago, but I still think of them all the time. Losing Mom was hardest. 

Not everyone handles things the same way, but always remember you are never alone. As impersonal as it may seem to some, even a message board can provide a place to go to talk about things.

[sightseer 895]

Thank you very much.  I have a brother and we've both been trying to reconnect.  We used to be close.  I know I'm not alone.  

[birdguy 3,943]

Mt Mom was almost 80 when she passed.  She had bladder cancer the doctor said was caused by her two pack a day habit for most of her life.

My brother called me that it was about that time so I flew out from Utah to California.  We were staying at her place.  She had a nurse.

My brother and I stayed at the house.  He was in the guest room and I slept on the couch.  The next morning she was up and abut making breakfast for my brother and I.  She and I played Scrabble all afternoon.  So I flew home the following morning.  Two days later my brother called and told me she had died.

It looks like she gathered herself up just before the end to spend a normal day with her sons.

Noel

[JRMurray 214]

I'm so sorry, @sightseer. I've been there. 

My mom passed away in June, 2019, at the age of 94. She was a feisty, fiercely independent woman who came to Canada from London as a war bride, and she proudly lived on her own until 93. It was her time to leave us, but we were lucky that one of the doctors in the care home told us a few weeks before she passed that she had only a few weeks left. We were also fortunate that the day that she died, the care home phoned me and told me that the family should see her that very day because she was on her way out. My family and I, as well as my brother and his family, got to say good-bye. I'm grateful for that.

I'm 61 now, and it's been two years, but I think about her every day. No matter how old we get, our mom is our mom is our mom. I miss her horribly.

[psolk 3,037]

Thoughts are with you @sightseer hopefully writing something here brought the tiniest bit of relief.  

My Grandmother recently passed @96 years old.  She always used to tell us that she was like Milk that was past it's sell by date and was determined to go out on her terms...  We live in the States she was in Leeds.  One day my uncle called to tell us she had taken a fall and refused to go to infirmary.  Apparently she had broken her hip and when the ambulance came she asked them "why would you bother taking me to hospital, it's not like you are going to fix me, I just want to go to bed"   She managed to convince everyone to let her do just that. They set up a bed and a nurse in her flat, put her on Morphine and stopped feeding her.  When I got there she was largely gone but my sister and my grandmother always had a very special bond.  Two incredibly strong women, my grandmother was my sister's beacon.  I told Flo (grandma) when I arrived that Angela was coming to see her and she just needed to hold on one more day before she went to sleep.  

Sure enough the next day my sister arrived from the States.  She went to Flo's bedside and spent 15 minutes with her before returning to the sitting room to be with the rest of us.  Not 5 minutes later the nurse came out and let us know she had gone to sleep peacefully at home and it was over.  But I SWEAR she did what she said all her life and went out on her terms.  I used to travel to Leeds 5-6 times a year to see her, I have been back once since she passed for the stone laying.  Other than that I prefer to cherish my memories of Leeds with my grandmother when I was younger and my only desire to go back is to show my wife the area that was such a big part of my life growing up.   It's like that part of the world now has a void I can't fill and the desire to return is no longer there 😞  

I wish you all the strength in the world, I'm not a prayer type person but my thoughts and best wishes are with you.   

[sightseer 895]

10 hours ago, birdguy said:

She and I played Scrabble all afternoon.

Noel -  my mom and I love to put jigsaw puzzles together and we used to play a game called "Upwords" thats a derivation of Scrabble.

I need to put up the card table.

 

To all:   Thank you for the thoughts and well wishes.

She's out of the hospital now.  The next door neighbor (her best friend) took her to see her general physician this morning.  hospital always requires she see her GP for some reason.  Shes got a heart doctor appt in a week or so.  They're adjusting meds again.

 

[birdguy 3,943]

Whenever I went home for a visit Scrabble was always a must with her.  She loved word games.  When she came to the United States from Belgium she taught herself English by doing crossword puzzles.  She taught me to read before I was in the first grade (I never went to kindergarten).  She would draw simple word puzzles for me to work and would buy easy crossword puzzle books for me when I was in the third grade.  And we would play verbal word games like '20 questions' or 'I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with ...'  and when you thought of a rhyming word you couldn't say it, you had to tell it's definition.

Besides that our house was always full of books.  Mom and Dad belonged to The Book of the Month Club and were always reading a book.  And they insisted my brother and I always had a book to read.  My Dad would sneak books to me and tell me not to let my mother see them.  Books like Mark Twain's Letters From the Earth and Anatole France's Penguin Island that were banned by the church.

I have a natural talent for writing.  I think those games I played with Mom contributed greatly to that as well as all those books I read.

During my service life I took a lot of college level courses and several service schools and they all counted toward getting a degree.  When I retired out of the Air Force I gathered all my transcripts and diplomas and sure enough I had more than enough credits for a Associates Degree, but I had never taken a course in English Composition so I didn't meet the requirements.  They said I could test for it but I don't know a preposition from a participle so I declined.  Besides, I like to tell the story of how I can't get a degree because I never took an English composition course, but I am a published writer.

Thanks again Mom, wherever you are.

Noel

Edited July 23, 2021 by birdguy

[neilhewitt 493]

@sightseer I lost my mum 8 years ago. That was after losing my dad the year before, though he had been ill with dementia and in a home for several years, so it was not a shock. Finding out that my mum had terminal bowel cancer at 69 was absolutely a shock, though. Chronic terminal illness is a difficult thing to deal with, but eventually I found that you all just get on with life as best you can, accommodating whatever changes you have to make, and while you acknowledge what's waiting in the wings, you figure you'll deal with it when it needs to be dealt with. My mum was a brave woman, a medical professional who knew full well what was happening and how things would go, and she wobbled from time to time but she never gave up. She was, in many ways, more of a support to me than I was to her.

She survived for 15 months post-diagnosis, which is way longer than the 3 months they gave her when they found the cancer, and when she started to finally fail I am sure she knew it was happening, because she started to become very insistent on being admitted to hospice for what was supposed to be a temporary period of pain management rather than end-of-life care, but which turned into exactly that when she unexpectedly became unresponsive shortly after being admitted. The doctors said that the cancer had entered the final stage, and that she would most likely never wake up again. So I did what she had asked me to do: I told the doctors to pump her full of opioids and let her go in her own time. She stayed around for another 8 days after food and water was withdrawn, occasionally opening her eyes in apparent shock and even sitting up momentarily (they told me this was just a neurological reaction, that she wasn't aware or awake; but it was alarming for us nonetheless), but mostly just unconscious. Her breathing took on an odd cadence, something apparently everyone does as the end nears. I sat in the room and talked to her non-stop for those 8 days, and a few other relatives and friends visited to say their goodbyes. And then it was over.

Losing anyone is never easy, but losing a parent hurts more. It marks a transition point in your life and you aren't ever the same again. I regularly dream about both my parents, or more specifically, they pop up in my dreams, and I know that's my mind's way of hanging on to the memory of them so that they don't fade away. I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, though both of them were bog-standard C of E, if not actually church-going, and the local vicar came and spoke to my mum in those last days, as she had asked for her to. For me, those memories are what remain of them both, just as other people's memories of me will be what remains when I go. You're not truly gone as long as someone remembers you. 

All of which is to say, I know and understand where you are now, in the in-between. Trying to live a normal life amid that uncertainty is hard. What is coming is going to hurt, I'm sorry, there's no getting around that, but you can hope for the process to be as peaceful and pain-free as possible when the time comes, and I sincerely hope that it is. And afterwards, it does eventually get better. You get on with your life, but you never forget. 

My sympathies to you and your family, and my best wishes for your mum. I hope she fights the good fight for a long while yet.

[Freo 83]

Sorry to hear your news. Its rather sad when a loved one passes, but it seems that she had a good life. My mother died suddenly at aged 45, when I was 14. I am now 78 and I still miss her. 

Stay safe.

[sightseer 895]

@neilhewitt    Your post brings back a lot of memories.  My dad died of cancer around Thanksgiving of 2004.  He lasted longer than they said he would but in the end it won.

I hate cancer.  I sat with him and watched him die over about 6 hours.  I know the labored breathing you speak of.  When he passed I just broke out crying.  I didn't know I would do that.

It was impossible to look at his favorite green chair without crying for a while.

My mom and I are much closer.  She actually died when I was in 7th grade.  She was having stomach surgery and they couldn't restart her breathing.  She says that she felt as if she were in our backyard and it was night.  She says it was the blackest black she ever saw but she could see a few stars.  She says " I WAS a child's white dress -- floating free -- and being drawn towards a light" --and there was an amazing peace that she felt.

She's not afraid of dying again and her telling me of her past experience makes me so not worried about it all either.

I'm just not looking forward to being so alone and losing a very close friend.

 

[sightseer 895]

15 hours ago, Freo said:

My mother died suddenly at aged 45, when I was 14. I am now 78 and I still miss her. 

I'm very sorry about that.  If that had happened to me, I would not be alive today.  You must be very strong.