A Moment of Disconnection

She tried to adjust her body to get comfortable, rejecting the process of her organs shutting down. She sat up and put her head in her hands. Her head lay in her hands. A sound, almost a word escaped her. The sound unrecognizable to me but my siblings exclaimed “Yes Mom Heaven!”
“It’s Ok you can go now. We love you.”

We all join in to recite the holy mantra of our childhood, the prayer that comes just prior to (or just after) Holy Communion. We were transformed into children. Children who did not know what to do so we clung to the savior of our youth. We chanted the words we were taught to speak in times of uncertainty. It was almost as if we were saying these prayers in the hope that our mother would be accepted into Heaven. It was kind of like an offering to God to show that it was not my mother’s fault that none of us were practicing Catholics.

I participated in the prayers but with the no sense of spirituality, more a sense of duty. I was waiting and watching. I was the watchman in the tower trying to spot death before he arrived. I had worked long and hard to keep death at bay but now I was ready to concede to it. I wanted to ensure that he would be there soon so that I could reassure my mother that she would not have to suffer much longer. Years, months, days, hours and now minutes of unnecessary torture needed to come to an end.

She continued to move and groan as we tried to give her more morphine to dull the pain, the pain of her body dying and for us, the pain of our souls being tortured. There were pauses of movement and of sound but then she would begin again.

And then she stopped.

There was no feeling of emptiness or of deaths cold hand snatching life away. It was if nothing had changed. I was waiting for an indication that the ordeal was over. I wanted the satisfaction that she was no longer suffering, that she was truly at rest. But instead I was left with the uncertainty of what just happened. I had to physically feel her to see for myself if her body had stopped functioning. She was gone. There was no whooshing of wind or ringing of bells. The lights did not dim and time did not stop. With that one touch a part of me no longer existed. My mind, my soul was no longer disillusioned into believing that I was an enduring being responsible for the protection of my loved ones. I tried to understand it, dissect it to comfort myself. Life became death. It transformed in front of my eyes and I never saw it, never felt it. We could not see it because it was always with us. How can I protect the ones I love from such an entity? I did not concede to death because to death I was never a worthy adversary.

In that instant I could not imagine my way out of the situation. I couldn’t picture her going to a better place. I was locked in an eternal reality that I could not escape. My mother had died and I had not prepared myself for this ending. It was like watching a horrific movie where an innocent victim is being beaten and the movie ends at that point. I never got to see the justification of the pain she had suffered, the reprisal to her illness or hear her utter some prolific words. Her life ended. I could not stop it nor could I help her with her. I was left there with no duty, the knight without the queen. In my mind I had failed.

It was Christmas night and somewhere at the exact time of her death someone was doing nothing of significance. Maybe they were watching TV, visiting with friends or just sleeping. Life was moving on unyielding even for my mother’s death. I felt a disconnection from the world, a feeling that I have never quite recovered from. It may be true that we are linked in some cosmic way but on this night I was alone. The one time I wanted, needed to feel the connection it was not there. I wanted to get a phone call from a friend who’d say, “I just had the strangest feeling” or hear that some amazing event happened anywhere at the time of her death but there was nothing. I was left disconnected and unplugged from the world.