Here’s What Her Friends Got Wrong.
This is part 1 of a 2 part series.
My mother passed away in March at 92. When friends heard the news, most of them said some version of: “Well, she had a good long life. And she was so healthy right up until the end.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell them they were wrong on both counts.
Mom had serious autoimmune conditions and chronic illnesses that would have put most of us in the permanent complaining department decades ago. Her personal philosophy — pick yourself up, put your clothes on, slap a smile on your face and head out the door — was not something she said. It was something she lived, completely, until her final weeks. You would never have known she had a pain bigger than a bug bite. That took considerable will.
As for a good life — it was a complicated one. Which is different. And more interesting. And a story for another day.
My mother was many things to me depending on the decade. For forty two years I was, in some ways, more of a mother to my mother than a daughter. I say this not as a complaint. It was simply how it arranged itself, and I would do it again.
After my father died suddenly, and then one of her ten grandchildren — losses that reshaped her from the inside — Mom became the keeper of the family record. She had telephone tag down to a science, able to recite what all nineteen of the rest of us were doing at any given moment. She rarely offered opinions unless asked, or unless she thought someone was seriously going off the rails, in which case she could not help herself and did not try. She was usually right.
My mother was many things to me depending on the decade. For forty two years I was, in some ways, more of a mother to my mother than a daughter. I say this not as a complaint. It was simply how it arranged itself, and I would do it again.
What she never lost, right up until the end, was her FOMO. Fully operational at 92. Anyone who wanted to visit should have the chance to do so — that was her position. Pink champagne was chilling. Italian pastries were at the ready. She said her final goodbyes in considerable style, which was the only style she had ever known.
• • •
The best time I ever spent with my mother was her final eight weeks.
Once she heard the hospice verdict, something released in her. The worries, the responsibilities, even the advice-giving role — all of it fell away. What was left was just her, basking in the love she had spent a lifetime building, as it came back to her from every direction. Children. Grandchildren. Friends. Colleagues. Neighbors. People she had quietly held for decades, now coming to hold her back.
I have walked with a lot of people toward death in my work as a spiritual director and a hospice volunteer. I have rarely seen anyone do it with more grace than my mother did. But that is Part 2.