Grief. My grief for my mother didn't begin on the day that she died, 8 months and 3 days ago. It didn't begin when she had the stroke the morning after I arrived for an ordinary visit in February 2020. When did it start?
Was it when Mom had to quit work because she had lost the use of her right arm? I don't think so. She was only 60 then, and so active and vital. Caring for patients, understanding them, advocating for them: nursing was her calling. But when she decided that her limitations meant that she wasn't an asset on the ward anymore, she quit and moved on.
She immediately began taking extension classes for seniors through the University of Saskatchewan, gaining access to whole new worlds of university-level learning. She started volunteering, doing one-on-one visits with isolated senior women who had limited family or social contacts. This was a huge bonus for those seniors: in addition to companionship, Mom was an experienced geriatric nurse who knew how and when to intervene if help was needed.
Mom also plunged into gardening in a way that she'd never had time for before, transforming her yard into a showpiece of flowers every summer. She spent time with my sister's sons, buying them the kinds of clothes that all teenagers want but that their parents can't always afford. She took them to the movies that they wanted to see -- which meant that when they were teenagers she saw a whole succession of movies that made her eyes bug out! She and her husband hosted family weekend after family weekend every summer at Wayne's house at Manitou Beach, providing rolling gourmet meals for the crowds, a beautiful garden, bird feeders, and endless games of cards.
They didn't just play cards at the lake. Summer and winter, with friends and family, over the years they cycled through a succession of different simple and fun card games like 31 or "President of the United States" before they were introduced to the ultimate party game: "Dimes". Drinks, uproarious fun, and playing cards for money (dimes of course!) to make it more interesting -- for years that was almost every weekend, and every gathering of the extended family.
They also travelled, both before and after Wayne's retirement. My mom's first trip overseas was a mid-winter week in London after their private runaway wedding. Together they visited Alaska, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York, Arizona, the Maritimes, Newfoundland, British Columbia, France, England, Italy, Germany....and doubtless other places that I've forgotten.
Mom grew up on a farm, rich enough to always have enough to eat, poor enough that her bag lunches for school were rhubarb jam sandwiches every single day. She didn't grow up dreaming of drinking fine wine, eating fine food, staying in grand hotels, travelling to Europe. You don't dream about what you can't even imagine.
I didn't mourn for mom during those years. It wouldn't have occurred to me to do so.
When did the uncertainty start? When did the grief start? Slowly....suddenly. One spring Mom came down with a serious case of the flu and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance to be rehydrated. She was fine, but after that, I worried every time I planned a holiday. Where would I be? Could I be reached if something happened? It was Wayne selling the house at Manitou Beach because they couldn't maintain two places anymore. It was Mom stopping Senior's extension classes because she didn't want to drive in poor winter weather. It was Mom incrementally becoming Wayne's full-time caretaker as various health crises robbed him of strength, as his breathing deteriorated, and as his world contracted loss by slow and painful loss.
Through it all, Mom accepted what came to her with patience, pragmatism, and compassion. She was matter-of-fact on our weekly calls. She continued to go for lunch with friends. She kept me up to date on family, on her neighbours and friends. She always minimized her own health issues, to the point that I can now hardly believe that I believed her. Every once in a while, ever so rarely, she let the mask slip and revealed how worried she was for Wayne or how much she missed travelling or shopping and joking with friends. I could see her life contracting as she experienced loss after loss. Sometimes she'd become snarky about something some friend or relative had done or said....but afterwards she was likely to turn the conversation and take their side, occasionally with a laugh. She always had a sense of humour, however black, about life's twists and turns.
My grief swelled as Wayne's health failed, and Mom's life shrank. It crashed in on me when Wayne became seriously ill for the first time. He was admitted to hospital with pneumonia after a week at the lake with his children, and needed to spend a month recovering on the convalescent ward at City Hospital before he could come home. Visiting him every day seems like a natural and ordinary thing for Mom to do, but it's a struggle when you have a physical disability and are solely responsible for a house and garden and all of your shopping and meals, when you need to keep 'the kids' up to date on their father's health, when you need to attend all of your spouse's medical appointments as well as your own. Mom seemed so alone through that crisis. The next inflection point came when Wayne's hernia descended in January 2017 and we had to take him to St. Paul's for emergency surgery. I configured my cell phone so that Wayne could easily call each of his children because we weren't sure if he was going to survive going under anesthetic. I'll never forget Mom gripping Wayne's hands as they waited for him to go in for surgery.
When Mom sounded despairing during a phone call in early 2018, I didn't know that Wayne's death was imminent. Mom did. During her professional career she had seen hundreds of elderly people decline on their way to death. I was able to be there for most of his last month, as Wayne became uncharacteristically querulous, frailer and frailer. I tried to relieve Mom of some of the labour of the household, I tried to tempt Wayne's appetite with treats, but in the end I wasn't there when she needed to call the ambulance, when he went to the hospital, when the end finally came.
Mom was brave after Wayne died. She sent me home to Vancouver, telling me that sooner or later she would have to be alone. She never complained, she never asked for sympathy, she never showed how devastated she was. But her life continued to shrink. She kept having to replace the battery in her car because she drove it so seldom. She spent most of her time alone. She'd lost so many of her friends by that point: one former boss developed dementia, and no longer recognized my mother when Mom called. Another close friend stopped driving and they stopped seeing each other in person. She stopped visiting with Marie, her former neighbour. She canceled the trip I'd booked for her to visit me in BC to see spring flowers in 2019 -- and maybe she couldn't have travelled alone. After that winter ended, but not before, she talked about how awful it had been and decided that she needed to move out of her house. We started touring Independent Living Facilities when I visited her that spring.
I tried to ignore the signs. I put aside my fears that Mom's painful knees and feet would make walking to the communal dining rooms difficult. I imagined her visiting Persephone theatre again with a group from the facility, a pleasure she had abandoned because continual construction around the theatre made it impossible to guarantee close-enough parking. I imagined her playing cards with new friends, kibitzing about curling while watching games on the TV in the lounge, inviting family to share a meal in the communal rooms. I downplayed her fears that her visible disability would make her an object of curiosity or pity. I tried to encourage her to look forward to the change as a renewed life, not the end of her independence.
I was in denial. That's a stage of grief too.
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