This post is inspired by the death of my best friend's mom two weeks ago. She died in the house which was my second home during my senior year of high school, a house that holds so many memories for me, good and bad, but mostly very, very good. Sleepovers, confidences, endless chatter, riotous laughter. I got seriously drunk for the first time in that house. The hospital bed which was set up in the living room was almost exactly over the spot where I spilled a glass of red wine in 1982. An epic moment, made all the more traumatic by the fact that the carpet was light blue. Of course it was, no one spills red wine on maroon carpet. But, she still loved me. At least, she kept telling me that. Love will redeem anything and everything. She nurtured me when I was young and confused. I nurtured her when she was sick and dying. You have to pay the kindness forward, it's really all that holds everything together when things go very, very wrong.
I was pondering all of these things, and letting my mind roam, as I sat with her in the darkness in the hours before she died. Her oxygen machine made a quiet, gurgling sound. Her childhood friend had come to be with her and I thought, what a gift it is to have a friend for a lifetime. A friend who will come to your deathbed and help change your diapers. A friend that will stand at the foot of your bed and sing hymns with a beautiful voice rendered hoarse because of severe asthma triggered by her horrible allergy to your dog. Is this really friendship, or something deeper than friendship? Sisterhood, perhaps. The dying woman's biological sister was nowhere to be seen. But her friend was here, as were many other friends who sat with her, held her hand, prayed with her, and laughed with her in her final days.
This woman's daughter amazes me, and I thought about her in those quiet hours. An only child of divorced parents, the burden of her mother's illness fell squarely on her. The task of her care is physically daunting and emotionally draining. She has a busy life, demanding career and new fiance an ocean away from this, her childhood home. And yet, here she is, putting it all aside, exhausting herself to give her mother the thing she wants most--to die in her own house, surrounded by her cherished things and the people who love her. How to describe my feelings for this amazing daughter? Pride? Awe? I thought about how this would be the way I want to die--in my house with its familiar scents and sounds, surrounded by the softness of my own linens and the voices and laughter of the people I love. It is such a gift to be able to die this way, a gift that depends entirely upon the ability and willingness of others to care for you.
The house was quiet when I woke up around 4:30. I knew it was over, I felt the stillness as soon as I opened my eyes. I slipped downstairs to confirm what I knew in my heart. I climbed the stairs to gently wake the amazing daughter, my dear friend, to tell her that her mom was gone. It's a blessing, really, when someone who has been suffering is at peace. We know that, we tell ourselves that, but we still cry. So we cried, we held each other for a quiet moment in the darkness before dawn, then we did what needed to be done. Phone calls. Paperwork. Medication purge. All of the myriad of small tasks which fend off the immediate crush of grief. The gift of minutiae that allows you to process the loss in a manageable way. My friend lost her mom, a loss which is almost incomprehensible to me. I witnessed my husband's grief in his father's dying days, an agonizing, inconsolable grief. In many ways my own grief was experienced through a prism--my own sadness over the suffering and death of this wonderful man I loved as a father, and the gut-wrenching pain I felt watching my husband endure that loss. I was reminded of this, as many of my saddest moments were witnessing Ellen's tears, or when I noticed the visible signs of the strain she was under. Wanting so much to take some of this burden from her, but knowing that was impossible.
So, I kept the vigil, there in the dark. And as a life slipped away, the best of what life has to offer was revealed. The love of a child for a parent. The enduring love and friendship of two women who played together as little girls. The gift of faith, and the peace it can bring to your life. Realizing what a profound blessing it is to have my own dear friend to walk through life with, with all of its joy and pain, and the unspoken acknowledgment that we'll always be there for each other.
