EY #27 & 28: Tell about your mother's failing health; death & funeral

This will undoubtedly be a rather somber post, but a story that really does need to be told if I'm telling my children and grandchildren about my life.  So, on this forty-second anniversary of my mother's death, it seems the appropriate time to do so.

My children grew up aware that I hated my birthday.  Future posts will provide additional reasons why, but the first reason I had to truly dislike my birthday had to do with the fact that my mother passed away just eight days before my sixteenth birthday, but the story begins two years earlier...

The February before my 14th birthday, my mother was just recovering from a bout with the flu when she came to me and asked be to feel below her right armpit.  She had apparently done a self breast exam and noticed three small bumps.  I felt them too, but at the time was totally unaware of the implication.  Suddenly, we were plunged into a two-year nightmare as she battled breast cancer.

She went to the doctor right away and went to the hospital for a biopsy.  We learned that she had inoperable breast cancer and most likely had six months to live.  Through radiation therapy and chemotherapy the six month sentence stretched to two years.  Years in which I learned to stop taking my mother and all that I had for granted.

Admittedly, I was the spoiled baby of the family, but fortunately I was fairly mature for my age and adapted to my new responsibilities.  While Miem took over the housework and quite a bit of the cooking when she began to care for my mother after she became home bound and then bed-ridden, there were skills that my mother taught me bit by bit while she was still well enough to do so.  Things like the bookwork for my dad's contracting jobs and paying the bills.  My name and signature were put on my parents bank accounts so I could write out the checks.  I learned to do the grocery shopping, I received permission to enroll in driver's ed a semester early so I could get my driver's license as soon as I could after I turned sixteen.  I began to assume responsibility for my aunt, DeeDee, who my parents had helped since the death of my grandmother.

I doubt that my mother saw the extra eighteen months to be quite the same blessing that I did. Of course she lost her hair due to the chemo.  Her right arm swelled up like a balloon and she had to wear a special elastic wrap on it to try to keep the swelling down.  I know that was extremely painful for her, but nothing was as bad for her as the result of the radiation.  The repeated radiation aimed at those three nodules burned holes into her breast and all the way through her body so that she had open sores where the radiation went in and came out.  I can't imagine how she must have felt having her fifteen-year-old daughter treating the sores and rotting flesh twice each day.  And it had to have been even more difficult having that same daughter begging her on a daily basis not to give up; that there were new medical treatments found every day and that we could be given a miracle.

I know it was an extremely humbling experience for me. The first time I had to help her walk to the bathroom because she couldn't walk the ten feet by herself was when I really realized I wouldn't have my mother with me much longer. I beat myself up for the things I knew I had done and said as a snotty teenager that probably hurt her terribly and that there was no way to ever take it all back. The truly amazing thing is that I know how much she still loved me in spite of myself.

The night she died, I was exiled to the downstairs apartment where my brother Al lived.  I kissed my mom good-night and told her I loved her and then was told that I needed to go downstairs to sleep to be there for my niece and nephew if they woke up in the night.  I know that they all thought they were "protecting" me so that I wouldn't actually have to be there when she passed away, but I knew when it happened.  I could sense it and I resented being deprived of a few extra minutes with her, but I knew that they thought they were doing what was right and didn't say anymore about it.

The following morning, I threw a bit of a fit as the family began making preparations for her funeral. As was the family custom, they were planning an open casket viewing and funeral.  I lost it.  My mother hated having people look at her. She hated being in the spotlight and she was very uncomfortable with anyone judging her appearance. (She didn't like to go to church because she only had one dress and "knew" that people at church would judge her for wearing the same dress every week.)  So, I insisted that she would not want a bunch of people looking at her laying in a coffin withe her swollen arm and fake-looking wig.  I agreed to compromise. We had an open-casket viewing and a closed-casket funeral.

Weeks later, my father and I went to Lincoln Memorial Park (in Aurora, IL) to choose the headstone for her grave.  We decided we would buy a stone for both my father and her and as I looked through the catalog (I found that rather nauseating... a catalog of headstones), I found the perfect one.  It had Lily-of-the-Valley, their birth month flower, on it.  More prophetic however, was the phrase "Together Forever."  It just felt right to me at the time.  Little did I know that eight years later I would truly come to understand what that statement could really mean when I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and two years after that when I had the opportunity to be sealed to my parents for all eternity in the Ogden, Utah temple.

I knew my mother for less than sixteen years in this mortal existence.  I've lived without her for forty-two, so far.  I'm in no hurry to be with her again, but I am so very happy and blessed to know that when the time comes, I will be with her again and be able to say all those things I never said and be able to introduce her to the rest of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren because I know, without a shadow of a doubt that Families CAN be Together Forever, through Heavenly Father's plan.