Flight of the Hummingbirds!

 Bird watching!

Toxic

When my mother was diagnosed with stage IV cancer, I took her into my home, which I knew was probably a bad idea, but my drive to be good and seen as someone she valued, drove most of that decision — and because I was coming to terms with the fact that she was going to die my thoughts were even more clouded than usual. Also, I believed spending time with her grandchildren would be good for her and for them.

    At the time, my husband and I shared the responsibility of driving our daughter to a school for children who had learning challenges. It was a three hour roundtrip. He had a fulltime job as a professor. I had another child to care for and now my mother and her two dogs. I drove my daughter three days a week, an hour and a half each way, and my husband drove two days a week. We also had to work in picking our son up at the end of his day because the school didn't offer busing. 

    Our lives were barely managed chaos.

    In that already stressful setting, came my mother, the woman who I'd felt like nothing more than a burden and inconvenience to all of my life. To say my judgment was unsound in taking her in, was an understatement. And I know it was my decision.

    From almost the beginning, there was tension. We had a cat and she insisted on bringing her two dogs. The stipulation was she keep them crated at night in our guestroom where she stayed. It was a nice guestroom: double bed, bathroom right outside her door, very large (had a sitting area) where she put the crate for her dogs, a couch, lots of bookshelves. But she didn't crate them. And they pee'd and pooped on our carpet. She left it there as she was sick. She also had accidents with her ostomy bag (I don't fault her for this, it is an account of what happened) which also ended up on our floor. I had dinner to  make. Laundry to clean. Children to bathe. Children to transport to and from all the events they still did. And our cat. 

    Often, my mom didn't like the food I made. She commented on it. Didn't eat it. Lashed out at me. Blamed me. If she had explained what helped her, made her feel better or was easier to eat, I'd have cooked it. But that was never how my mother was, and why I thought she'd be different in pain and terrified of dying is now beyond my comprehension and was stupid at the time. 

    One particularly bad day that haunts me occurred after my mother got ill and I had to rush her to the Cancer Center. She was pissed that I took her. As she lay on the cart, she blamed me for her condition at that time. I think I blocked exactly what she'd said out because it damaged me. Horribly. When I came home, my husband was there, and I lost it. Stammering, bawling, deep guttural sobs poured out of me as I questioned why she would say that, how nothing I ever did was good enough. How at every turn she always criticized me. And that put the nail in the coffin for my mother staying in our home. My husband, who'd been sleeping in the basement, because he'd always gone to the guestroom when I snored him out, was over it. 

    So, a few weeks before Christmas -- God this still hurts to think about -- my mother made some comment about my husband being mean. On top of the dogs, my hysterical outburst, her inability to hold her tongue, my naivete in inviting her in the first place, it all came crumbling down. He snapped. He said, "Then, maybe it's time we set up a time for you to go home." She shouldn't have said it. He'd opened his house to her with dogs he couldn't stand as they defecated on his new carpet, forcing both him and me to walk them without a thank you. And now she'd insulted him. He shouldn't have said it. Here's a woman who was struggling with her own mortality, in pain, sad, and probably feeling alone and useless. Sending her home to go through this alone was a punishment. The two people I loved had been locked in a pressure cooker that I'd put them in, and the lid had just exploded. 

    We had an early Christmas and then drove her back to her retirement community. She broke down hysterically as we prepared to leave. The retirement community had failed to put her room back in order and it was one more thing that she saw going horribly wrong in her life. I broke down, but her friend told me and my husband to go. So, we did. 

    I made more trips to see her between Jan and August that year. In July, I left my husband and two kids behind to live with my mom in hospice until she died on August 6, 2012. I watched her go from barely over 100lbs to below 60lbs. I watched her deteriorate from talking and laughing to the time when speech leaves all of us before death. And I watched her plead with her eyes because she could no longer speak, for me to help her. But as the death rattle filled her room, I sat by her side, holding her wrist because she couldn't grasp my hand and that bothered me. She stared off, fixed into space until her gaze glided to the ceiling above my brother at the foot of her bed and over me at the side of her bed. Then, her pulse stopped forever. But before she left this world, she'd gotten one more jab in. She told my brother that he'd always been her favorite as I stood in the same room next to them both.