(Originally published on Motherless Mom, May 12, 2019)
When you’ve lost your mother, Mother’s Day takes on a new dimension. Before I became a mother myself, it was a day solely dedicated to wallowing in my heartbreak and extreme emotional distress. I would buy a bottle of Dewar’s scotch and drink “Dewar’s and Water on the Rocks with a Lemon Twist,” just as I had heard her order hundreds, maybe thousands, of times in my childhood, and listen to Patsy Cline on repeat. Not only did this serve as an appropriate self-flagellation ritual, but it also felt like a fitting tribute to a woman whose professional alcoholism I had taken on when she passed away like it was the family business. Granted, I was quite a bit sloppier than her in that department, but in my defense- I was an amateur when I took up the family profession at age 20.
The loss of a mother hits you hard regardless of age or cause of death. I have heard from many other motherless daughters, and we all share a very similar experience. This loss is one that, for most of us, is so intricately tied to our sense of self that it knocks us off course, as if now that this physical tether that kept us connected to our very earliest and simplest selves has been severed, so too has our identity. Most of us learn how to be in this world from our mothers. When our mothers are gone, who is left to remember where and how we began? Who is left to care about our progress? There will never be anyone to do that quite like our mothers, and we have to relearn how to be in this world without them.
In addition to this typical pain and grief that all women experience when they lose their mothers, I carry around additional baggage related to how she passed. Like so many other daughters, our relationship experienced a major dynamic shift when I became my mother’s caregiver. First, when I was 18 and her emergency surgery turned into two months in a nursing home with morphine-induced psychosis that we were told she might never recover from, then again just a year and a half later.
When I received the phone call from my little sister that something was wrong with Mom and I needed to make the 3 1/2 hour drive home immediately, I threw my dog in the car and drove home from the Chicago suburbs… after first making a side trip to my older brother’s house to pick up some grass.
This tacked on almost two extra hours to my trip, and by the time I arrived, it was clear Mom needed the emergency room. She was completely disoriented and incoherent, and my 15-year-old sister- the only one who lived with Mom then- had already called our aunt who was a nurse. She wasn’t sure what had happened, but Mom definitely needed the hospital. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, they waited until I arrived to head there. They waited until I, who stupidly took an additional side trip to get grass, arrived.
That night there were intense storms that knocked out power in our central Illinois town, and the hospital was running on backup generators. Because of this, they were unable or unwilling to do diagnostics on my mom like CT scan or MRI; they were convinced it couldn’t possibly be a stroke because my mother could still lift both arms up at the same height and there was no asymmetry of features. Due to the power outage, the electronic record system was unavailable (this was back in 2005, I’m assuming most hospitals have upgraded since) so they were unable to see their own records of her congenital heart disease, her history of heart attacks and TIA’s (mini-strokes that people often don’t even realize they have until the evidence shows up via brain scan) and her prior emergency surgery less than two years prior, and had to rely on our verbal history of these things.
It was determined that she must’ve taken too many of one of her 10 or so medications, and that they would keep her for observation. Three days later, still no increase in cognition, the hospital finally ordered the MRI that would diagnose her major stroke. At this point, she had suffered incredible brain damage, but it would still be another three months before she passed.
This period was very messy. Mom was always a flight risk in hospitals- she despised them- and would rip out IV lines and bolt for the door if left unattended, so the way hospitals deal with that is to strap patients to their beds. To avoid this, I stayed at the hospital with her around the clock, taking breaks to run home for showers when someone could come and sit with her.
Even so, this didn’t always work out.
I slept there at night in a chair beside her bed, and one night I awoke to the screeching of the bed alarm (the monitor they put on hospital beds for patients that shouldn’t get up without assistance), the incessant beeping of the machines beside her, a flurry of activity from several nurses and orderlies surrounding my mother, and blood everywhere. She had woken up and pulled her heart catheter out. If you aren’t familiar, a heart cath is a long tube placed in an artery and threaded through the blood vessels in the heart; Mom’s was placed through her neck, and when she pulled it out it splattered her blood all around the room. I was with her to prevent exactly this sort of thing, yet I didn’t. I slept right through this.
Standing in the hospital bathroom under the harsh fluorescent lights, washing my mother’s blood off of me as best I could, I was overwhelmed with the knowledge that I was failing her. There were so many ways I fell short in those days, too many to write about here. She was always such a powerful force in our lives, the classic Take No Shit kind of woman that didn’t take no for an answer, but now she seemed powerless. All I ever wanted to do was be there for my mother the way she had been there for us always, but I wasn’t there early enough to get to the hospital before the power outage, I didn’t know to insist on a CT scan or MRI the next day once power resumed, and it didn’t help anyone that my very presence there was agonizing to her.
I felt better being there with her, but she didn’t share my sentiments.
You see, the stroke left her with brain damage so significant she didn’t recognize us, and she hated me, specifically. I was the one always there with her, always conversing with the doctors and nurses who were keeping her there, always telling her, “no,” as she attempted to get up out of the bed without adjusting the IVs and monitors, or when she tried to use Tic Tacs as denture adhesive, and especially when I was the one who later had to physically remove her car keys from her hands as she tried to fight me for them at her house.
For anyone that knew my mom, even in a weakened state, you didn’t want to be on her shit list. My mom looked at me with hatred and repugnance every single day for the last three months of her life. I wasn’t her daughter anymore; I was the bitch holding her hostage in her own house, and I honestly think she suspected I was poisoning her as I was the one doling out her meds while she continued to get sicker and sicker.
How’s that for being helpful to her, right?
My mother had always been very clear with us kids that she didn’t want to pass away in a hospital bed like her mother had. She was very specific about her end of life wishes and had been discussing these with us since I was just a kid. She would walk around the house, casually pointing out the different things she wanted us to have. “Bob will get the mirror city, that’s his. Make sure you cremate me; I don’t want to be buried in the cold ground” and on and on. This was all very matter of fact to her. She always knew she would die young, I think.
See, my mom was born with a congenital heart condition, and she had several heart surgeries throughout her very early childhood. She was in and out of hospitals her entire life and she hated them with a passion. Unfortunately, her intense avoidance of doctors and hospitals contributed to every minor, treatable ailment spiraling out of control until it became an issue worthy of an ambulance ride or an emergency surgery. The first time I was her medical POA (power of attorney), she was in a state of morphine induced dementia and psychosis for about two months before she came out of it, and during that time they had to place a feeding tube to sustain her that I signed off on. When she came to, she was furious with me. She made me promise that I would never allow that again.
Even knowing all that, the decision to sign her out of the hospital AMA (Against Medical Advice) will probably always haunt me. Her cardiologist, whom she liked to refer to as her “Teddy Bear,” explained to me, my older brother, and my younger sister that her chances of survival on the operating table were about 20% and that even then, there was no guarantee that the surgery would be successful and would remove all the vegetation from her weakened heart valves.
Mom had global aphasia and we had no real communication with her for those last three months. We would occasionally catch glimpses of our Mom in her eyes, but the rest of the time we were looking at someone who was looking at strangers, and I will never forget what that feels like. That day, however, Mom cried with us, her in her hospital bed, my siblings and I at her side, and her Teddy Bear perched at the end of the bed. It seemed like she somehow understood, but she still could not sign herself out. It was up to me, her medical POA, to do it. This was the paperwork that allowed her to die at home in her silk leopard print pajamas. I still keep this paperwork.
The night before my mother died, my boyfriend drove down from Schaumburg and I slept in the other room with him instead of on my mother’s floor, the way I had been. That next morning, he woke me up around 6am to tell me my mom needed me. She was crawling on the floor, motioning towards the bathroom. We got her up into her wheelchair and that was the first time I saw her seize, her body stiffening into a rigidity I didn’t know the human form was capable of.
My mother didn’t get to pass away peacefully in her sleep. Her death was long, arduous, and painful. I remember I put one of her pain pills under her tongue as she was seizing in her bed at home that morning, hoping and praying that some would dissolve so she could have some peace in her final moments and 14 years later, I still think of this often. I don’t think it dissolved at all, really. I think I probably added to her distress by putting a foreign object in her mouth as her body seized and spasmed during the roughly 8 hours she had left here on Earth.
I’ll never know though, because she’s not here to ask about it.
Life and death are both messy, and the baggage I still have to unpack from my mom’s death is heavy and full of regret and sorrow, but there is one thing I think is fairly simple. Love will outlast death, time and time again.
My mother was born Roberta Sue Eacker in 1950 and died as Robin Kirkpatrick on August 20, 2005, four husbands, three living biological children, and one baby girl that died in her arms at only 4 days old, later. She was an amazing cook, a fiercely loyal friend, a hell of a pool player, and she had a heart bigger than she was. Her curls were the deep shade of red you can find in a glass of fine red wine or in the last moments of a summer sunset, and her chocolate brown eyes were flecked with gold. She dressed the way she lived: bold, shimmery, glittery, and grand, with people sometimes pausing on the street of our small Illinois town to do a double-take at this petite red-head dressed like she was headed to Vegas. In her generosity with what she had, she was lavish.
This will be the 13th Mother’s Day I have spent without her, and while each one is full of the bittersweet heaviness of nostalgia and grief that all loss contains, the love never falters. Despite the rough and rocky road we traveled together in her final years, my mother had already filled me with enough love to last a lifetime, because that’s what mothers do.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.