I mean, she went from 100% fine to collapsed in the ICU a few days before Halloween. Halloween was when I found out she wasn't going to get better. November is when I dropped out of school, came home, and became a primary caregiver. Thanksgiving is when she really got out of bed and had energy for the last time. It's the day we took our last family pictures together, with her in her wheelchair and us gathered around. She died three weeks later. I buried my mother the day before my birthday. Christmas and New Years were empty, terrible affairs.
I know, it's the cruelest timing ever. But for some reason, Halloween is the holiday that's really ruined for me, not any of those other holidays. I guess because that's when it all started.
Every year, about a week before Halloween, it happens. I have an off-day. Nothing I do or say makes me happy. I end up huffing around the house, ignoring myself. I've already been sad about mom for four years, I tell myself. That's quite enough time. So stop it. I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm in a weird mood. And then it always ends in me sobbing in bed because, no matter what, the truth is I'm still sad about my mom.
I remember that Halloween. The last-minute flight home to Oregon. My older brother and I took the little kids trick-or-treating. We stayed back on the sidewalk, reluctant to walk the kids up to the doors. The neighbors would have asked how mom was, and I didn't have the strength to tell them. So we stayed back on the sidewalk. The neighbors would look at us, and we would nod and look away, and all of us knew without saying anything.
This time of year can be hard for me. So many memories are attached to every thing I do, every holiday we have, every week that passes. The day I found out mom wasn't going to get better. She told me she was excited to go be my angel mom, even though she was so sad she couldn't be my mom on earth anymore. The day we bought the wheelchair transport van and brought mom home to spend the rest of her days with her family. The rows and rows of cards strung up on the wall. The sanctity of those midnight watches, with the Christmas lights shining through the window, my mom sleeping in her hospice bed, and me in the recliner, quietly counting our shared breaths during the night. The day the doctor hugged me after he told me she would probably make it to Thanksgiving, but not much farther, and definitely not to Christmas. The angel choir of children from my church, standing in the soggy lawn and getting their Sunday shoes wet so they could sing "families can be together forever" through the window to my mom. The letter she left me.
I think the next post I'll write about my mom will be about all the angels. So many kind people, so much love, so much support and help and so many little miracles happened during that time. Miracles from people I could see, and miracles from angels I couldn't see. That's what I remember most about that time.
I want to focus on the good this year. Remember my mom for the nineteen years of a happy, loving, funny, gentle mother - not the seven and a half weeks of her decline. I know if she were here she'd tell me the best way to make myself feel better is to get up and serve someone, not sit there and cry. So I think I will. And, in true mom fashion, I'll have some hot tamales while I'm at it.
