She's gone
nine years later
My mother died on the 26th March in 2017. My youngest brother, Mike, died, on the 16th March this year. The shock of his passing has led me to reflect on my mother’s death, and to think of her and Mike. This is an excerpt from my book, my mother, my madness (published by deep south, 2020)
25 March - Emergency Room
My mother got better after her illness last year, although she was frailer. It took time for her to get back to herself, but she was able to move back to her apartment and was walking about using her wheelie walker. Her ankles were painfully swollen. They cut her hair as it had become matted when she was in hospital, so she looked more like the person I was familiar with; the long thin hair in a ponytail had been strange for a woman like my mother. She’d recently got new dentures; she’d lost her upper dentures in the previous hospitalisation episode.
The evening before last I went to the Milnerton Mediclinic with Kate, just a visit … but when we arrived on the ward there was a scene from ER going on. The curtains were drawn – there was a swarm of people busy with her and there were all kinds of machines and beeping noises and people rushing out and rushing back.
The doctor emerged from the curtains, “She has had heart failure,” he said. “We resuscitated her after three attempts.” He asked me to consider if they should resuscitate her if “she went again”. I felt panicky; it was hard to breathe. What was the right answer? I didn’t know. He told me he was taking her into the ICU and he told me what he would do for her. I couldn’t really make head or tail of what he said. I heard words as though I was hearing a foreign language that I only vaguely understood. Ruptured ulcer. Heart failure. Kidney failure. Vomiting. Ventilator. Resuscitate.
He asked me if I had someone who could come and be with me. A sibling. A friend. I understood only then that he meant this was very serious. That I would need support. I called my friend, also Colleen, who has effectively been Kate’s granny. She left her pottery class and came with her friend Marijke, who was also at pottery. Marijke took Kate to get something to eat. She hadn’t had supper. My sister-in-law, Gaye Lisa, and my niece Megan arrived too.
Eventually, after my mother had been in the ICU for nearly two hours, the doctor came out and told us what had happened, what he now suspected and what he was planning to do. He was calm and kind and clear. It seems she had a perforated small intestine and this had infected her whole body. Her kidney had failed, her blood pressure was very low, and her body was 10 times more acidic than it should have been. She had effectively been vomiting up the contents of her small intestine. He said there was a single digit percentage that she might recover from this, and he could not say what her neurological function would be.
He said many other things that I don’t remember. I remember kindness. Calm. The kind of love that strangers can have for other strangers, because they are human too.
26 March - Gone
After the doctor told us what to expect, Kate went to my friend Colleen’s home and I stayed with Gaye and Megan. We went in to see her in the ICU. She was lying flat on her back. She was not conscious. She looked tiny and shrunken under the bedclothes and was attached to many machines and tubes and lines. She was being put onto dialysis as we came in to see her. They had taped her eyes shut. They had not been able to clean her hair, sticky from vomiting.
My mother lying in the hospital bed. I knew (I think I knew) it was her deathbed. I touched her head. I told her I loved her. I stroked her forehead; I patted her arm through the bedclothes. They told me she was very cold. Gaye was able to understand the numbers on the machine – I had no idea what I was seeing, I could see colours and numbers, but once again, it was utterly incomprehensible to me.
There was some beeping and intensity, and then the doctor told us she was gone. He said sorry. The nurses said sorry. We went outside to the waiting area. I was numb.
Gaye phoned Gerry. While she was on the phone the doctor came out and told us that my mother had come back, she was breathing again, her heart was beating again.
***
We went back in, stood next to her bed. After a while we returned to the waiting room. I decided to go home to get my phone charger as my phone’s battery had almost run out. I would stay at the hospital all night; I knew she was going to die that night. When I got back, Gaye and Megan left. They live in Kommetjie, a long way to the Milnerton Mediclinic.
It was now about 12.30. I lay down in the patients’ lounge on a couch. The night manager sister kindly brought me a duvet and pillow. I slept in short patches for half an hour or forty minutes at a time. I kept expecting the nurses to come and tell me that my mother had died.
At about 4 in the morning, one of the sisters came and told me she wasn’t doing too well. I went through. Her blood pressure was very low. I said, “It’s Ok Mom, you can go. You will be able to be with Dad now.” I didn’t believe rationally that was what would happen. But I said it and meant it. Death is a mystery.
After I had been there for about fifteen minutes, the nurses told me again they were sorry. She has gone. She has gone. I touched her on the forehead, kissed her there.
I looked around. This was not a good place to die. I don’t know how aware she was of her surroundings, of where she was. The flashing lights, the noise, the beeps, the tubes, and lines, the machines. The high-techness of it all. She hadn’t wanted to come to the hospital, I heard later. She had to be persuaded, coerced. I think she knew she was going to die and she didn’t want to have yet another ambulance ride, the ICU.
***
The nurses told me they would clean her up and then I could come and be with her. “Can you let the family know? Or do you want us to?” I said I would. I called Gaye. She called Gerry and Mike. I phoned Sean in Scotland.
***
Her death struck me the most deeply several hours later, when I finally went back to see her. The nurses had been waiting to hear from the doctor. There are protocols, they couldn’t do anything to her until he gave the go-ahead. The tubes were gone; the tape over her eyes was gone. She looked more herself now than she had before, but she was cold. I touched her again. Mom. Mom.
The sisters brought me several cups of tea; I had to sign for her rings and a big plastic bag filled with her meds. Boxes and boxes of pills for all of her conditions and illnesses. I cried and couldn’t stop for a long time.
It was morning traffic, a beautiful autumn morning. I drove down Koeberg Road, towards Table Mountain. My mother is gone. The mountain she could see from her apartment and the view she did love in spite of herself came closer and closer as I drove home.
***
I feel strange, not quite myself, I find it hard to really concentrate on what people are saying, my ability to concentrate comes and goes. I feel heaviness in the centre of my body. I’m glad it was quick, the end, and that my mother did not have to live for a long time in frail care, or some kind of nursing situation, in the liminal space between life and death. It was quick and she is gone, and she did not suffer for long in the end.
Oh Mom.
18 April - Indian summer
It’s almost a month later. Even in death my mother defies me. I have had many expressions of condolences and I’m thankful for them, it means that there are people who have noticed enough to say something. And many of the expressions are kind and caring. However, I can’t take them into my heart in a simple open way. My relationship with my mother was so fraught and complicated that even now I don’t feel plain grief.
Part of what I’m grappling with: Is she really gone? How can this be? I know I was with her when she died. I saw the last breath leave her body. I saw her body in the funeral parlour, her mouth looked like a beak; she didn’t have her dentures in. Her beautiful cheekbones and high forehead were visible, but she wasn’t lovely in death, she had dark rings around her eyes, as though she had been in a fight.
My oldest connection to life, to my life is gone. Even though I feel something of a relief that the burden of caring for her has been lifted from me, even though I feel lighter, I’m still grappling with what her death means.
We have celebrated her life twice now – once with her friends and family from the Fish Hoek area at the Glen Cairn golf course, and once at the Luxury Retirement Resort – where we were able to thank the staff and acknowledge her life with the other “inmates” as she called them.
We buried her ashes at Silvermine on the ridge that overlooks Cape Town and False Bay. My siblings were here and we did it together. We buried her near where we buried the ashes of David, her husband, our father. There was something satisfying about doing all the right things, getting the needful things done. I like the thought that she and David have a lovely view from where their ashes are buried. They can look down onto False Bay, the sea.
Life goes on. We’re having a glorious Indian Summer here in Cape Town, the rains still have not come, the drought continues. If you didn’t know about the drought, you would be able to simply enjoy the exquisite days.
4 May - It takes time
Was shopping for a few things for Kate yesterday late afternoon at Woollies in Cavendish. I nearly turned to her to say, “Granny Sally would like that.” A blue cotton shirt. It’s taking time for all the parts of my psyche to remember that she has died.
***
It’s the same with Mike, I keep forgetting he is gone.
My book is available in the US from here and internationally from all major online retailers either as a print book or an eBook; and in South Africa from Takealot or here.
Oh, Colleen. Such a powerful recollection of the most bizarre and incomprehensible time. Thanks for sharing this. Beautifully written. This is the part that landed right inside me: "However, I can’t take them into my heart in a simple open way. My relationship with my mother was so fraught and complicated that even now I don’t feel plain grief." This is the part I also know intimately.
Wow Cohl, what an experience. You were there as I was for Dad. The grief is palpable. I miss all three of them, my family. There are three left of that original six. Thank god that life goes on and that children and cousins exist and some small part of the tales of the life we lived continue to give some meaning to it all. Lots of love. Sean.