On Mom’s Passing

Scattered thoughts over the last few weeks surrounding my mother’s passing.

• Keeping track of everything going on would have been so much harder without the internet and mobile phones.
• My dad was in a VA hospital, and my mother was in a private for-profit hospital. I don’t think it’s just libertarian bias that makes me like the private hospital much better.
• I completely lost interest in watching House while my mom was in the hospital. It hasn’t returned.
• It was incredibly frustrating trying understand what the doctors were saying about my mother’s chances. They hate to say there’s no real hope, even when there’s no real hope.
• The hospice workers, on the other hand, were very clear. It was a relief to be given a direct answer to a direct question.
• On my mother’s last day, a hospice nurse called to tell me that based on certain signs, my mother was “actively dying.” What a strange turn of phrase that is…yet obvious in its meaning.
• My mother died on the exact same day of the year as my wife’s mother.
• My mother was quite vehement that she wanted no funeral or memorial ceremony. She stopped going to other people’s funerals many years ago—she couldn’t stand having to remember them all that way—and so she didn’t want a ceremony for herself either. My wife and I are okay with her choice, but I think some of my mom’s friends are a little disappointed. I can understand that. But I also know what my mother wanted.
• Empty funeral homes are creepy. I’ve seen way too many horror movies.
• When we were talking with the funeral director, she asked us if we wanted a notice in the newspaper. I thought about it—perhaps people who know my mother but weren’t in her address file would find out about her if we put in a notice—but ultimately decided it wouldn’t do much good. As it happens, my eulogy for my mother is the top result for her name on Google and Yahoo. I don’t think a routine death notice could have done that.
• My mother died of pneumonia, probably caused by an infection. You don’t catch infectious diseases from nowhere. You catch them from other people. Since my mother rarely left her home, she must have caught it from a visitor. I wonder which one of us it was.
• I keep stumbling over phrases like “my parents’ apartment” and “mom and dad’s place.” That’s probably going to happen for a while.
• I’ve had a few of those moments where I imagine my mom’s reaction when I tell her something and then remember that I can’t.
• Then there are those times where I remember something I was supposed to do for my mother but kept forgetting. Over maybe two seconds I go through feeling upset with myself for not doing it, then feeling relieved that it no longer matters, then feeling guilty that I felt relieved.
• When I moved into my parents’ place, I was pretty careful not to disturb the operation of the household. I tried to always put everything back the way it was, and I bought the exact same groceries my mother had. I’m slowly realizing there are things I can change, such as putting pots and dishes on high shelves and buying gallons of milk instead of the half-gallons my mother could lift. I can also rearrange the couch cushions and leave the remote control wherever I want.
• We’re starting to clean my mother’s stuff out of the apartment. My mother had a lot of keepsakes, and it feels very wrong to contemplate throwing away things that she held onto for thirty or forty years. It’s the most vivid reminder of her passing. I’ll probably keep a few of her things for no good reason.
• It doesn’t bother me that it’s Mother’s Day…but I’m glad all the Mother’s-Day-themed commercials are over.