June. 1st, 2005

When a Butterfly emerges...

Heh.... ok so you know you have committment issues when you neglect your daily journal, in fact, forget it even exists - not even including all the important details that literally rock your world. My mom has since passed away since my last entry. She died March 10th,2005 at 1pm.

Sometimes I have to say it out loud to myself or write it down to believe it's actually true, that she is gone. It seems cruel to do that to myself, but I am still in denial. Her cancer took her far too quickly, even the day she died. She didn't want to die in hospital, she said that right from the day she was told it was terminal. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a cancer I learned after she passed was the most painful and fastest-spreading of all of them. At the time I thought ' it can't be too serious, just remove the pancreas.' She didn't seem concerned, nor my friend who was the one who gave her the chemo treatments. The chemo itself was a light one that didn't make her sick or make her lose her hair; I thought it was that way because her illness wasn't so bad, but in fact they were trying to give her the best quality of life possible for the short amount of time she had left. I don't know why I was so out of the loop when it came to her condition - did I simply just refuse to hear it or did everyone really not know themselves? All I know was that a week before I was to leave I had to cancel a flight I had made to go to Ohio Mar.10 to see my bf because my mom had suddenly become seriously ill and riddled with pain. She was from then on bed-ridden and heavily medicated with shots of morphine and a cocktail of pills I couldn't even begin to name. I went with her finally to one of her chemo treatments as I had promised I would from the beginning only to hear the doctor tell her that after some tests were done, it was revealed that the chemo was no longer working that her cancer was now spreading rapidly, that her health would start to deteriorate within a few weeks where she would lose consciousness and eventually die.

What it must be like to have a death sentence handed to you and to be faced with death in a short time's notice. My family started to prepare to have her settled in at home, having the nurses make home calls, bringing in a wheelchair and necessary bathroom equipment to assist her, even a hospital bed to keep her comfortable. So quickly she lost her appetite, unable to even keep her water and medications down. I watched my mom go from a sane, talkative woman to incoherent and in and out of sleep in a matter of days. I apologized to my mom for the things I had said to her in the years past that had hurt her and she told me not to worry about the small things. I had told her before that I was planning on cancelling my trip to help take care of her and she told me to go and that she would be ok, but if she were to go while I was there under no circumstances was I to come home! Nothing short of a threat! Typical of Isabel.
But I went ahead and cancelled it anyway once I saw how quickly death was settling in, and I told her of my decison and she was disappointed in me. I know now that she must have had some sort of understanding of what was coming for her in the next few days because she mustered up the strength enough to give me heck for not going to see the guy who she must have known would become my life. The morphine was no longer doing the trick for her as the pain was becoming constant and the morphine made her delirious and really aggressive causing her a lot of stress and her family, angst. The doctor told us that he wanted to switch her over to methadone to help control the pain a bit better but in order to monitor her she needed to be in hospital, overnight at the most. She agreed to it. That night my sisters and I went there to be with her and as if some miracle had happened it was just her and us, noone to bother us, no family or nurses to interrupt. She heard us come in and regained consciousness for one moment to give us a big smile and say hello and then she went out again like a light. We spoke to her and told her we loved her and that we were going to take her home the next day. An hour later she opened one eye once more while we sat around her and took a long look at each of us, one at a time as if to remember our faces. It occurred to me briefly that this may be her way of saying goodbye, but even then I wasn't ready and dismissed it from my mind.

The next day I wanted to take my two good friends of many years to see my mom for the last time and to say their good-byes to her. We took our time getting to the hospital, stopping to chat with their family members and answering their questions about my mom's health. We finally arrived at the Palliative care ward at 1:15pm and we snuck into my mom's room past all the nurses whom we know now were huddled around the phone trying to contact my family. The curtain around my mom's bed was drawn and so I told my friends to just wait a moment while I checked on her. I went in and she looked so different - she looked so undisturbed and at peace that I had to stand there and watch her. Her mouth was open as it usually was when she struggled to breathe but then I noticed she was no longer breathing. 'Oh, mom' . I was holding her hand and she was still warm. A nurse came rushing in asking us who we were and didn't we see the butterfly that was pinned to the curtain, the one that was meant to warn people in the room that the patient had since passed on to a better place in a better body, like the butterfly leaving its cocoon. It was mayhem as I was pulled out of the room; I said 'Sorry' to my friends as I was shoved past them, for what I wasn't exactly certain of, though I had an idea. Next thing I know I have a phone shoved in front of me and was being instructed to call my family. I couldn't remember numbers, I was trying too hard not to lose it, not to be knocked over by what I knew was going to be confirmed. The nurses never told me my mom had passed... they didn't have to; my friend finally lost her cool and said out loud "No one has told her anything yet - she doesn't know." They all look ashamed and finally one pulled me over and told me what I had figured out for myself, that she had passed away not just 10 mins ago.

She was always a private lady that way, not wanting to be made a fuss over - so of course she took her first opportunity alone to slip away. She wanted to die at home, she made it very clear. She went in to have her meds switched and catches a chest bug which her body cannot fight off and it takes her life not even 24 hours later.

I heard recently that the morning she died she was still cracking jokes. She told my uncle " This is RIDICULOUS! I am finished with smoking!" But she knew her time was up and she had said she was ready to meet God even though she wasn't ready to die, to leave her husband and her children. Two weeks before she died she went with my Dad to Home Depot to pick out a colour to repaint the kitchen. The can of paint and the brushes sat there for a good two months until just last weekend. It's painted now and sometimes I still expect her to come around the corner and make a scene : " That's not the colour I picked here on this swatch!!"

Cast her gently into morning, for the night has been unkind.