Like almost all blog posts of mine, this is a write-and-toss. It will be imperfect by its nature, and all the more important because of the organic way in which life flows. I’d like to start with one of my favorite quotes that brings me peace during times like these:
“Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn’t death of things, then there wouldn’t be any life to celebrate.” – Norman Davies
That quote comes to mind because, quite frankly, I’m a restless person. It’s ironic that another “How to Make a Brick” post would be typed up over the course of several days. Astoundingly, I find myself compelled to do so, it is strangely fitting.
What started The Demented Ferrets for me, was to have something to show for myself. Something small that I could look back on with pride and some sense of accomplishment… something that carried my personal ethos, and the ethos of those I cared about. Yet, the journey we’ve taken to even get this far has been nothing but an uphill climb for myself, Kresh and Ruka. I wish I could say all my posts here on the blog have been fun and games, but sadly life is hardly so… often in-spite of its plethora of gifts, life is filled with stress, frustration, tragedy, and a sense of discontent.
Occasionally, I always return to the heart of the matter…
What ultimately rests in this post will be little more than reflective thoughts, turns of phrase, and stories that echo in the long hours. An all too busy mind needs reprieve somehow. What I bestow to you today is a loving, if tedious and rambling memorial. My mother is a woman who through stubbornness, gumption, and willpower alone put up with me of all people… and for 35 years… staggering, right?
Let me cut to the chase; these tidbits are being written during the last few days of my mother’s life. At the time of writing this, we’re preparing to place her into hospice, once this post concludes, she will have taken her last breath. To celebrate her place within my family, to reflect, and to grieve… this is all I can do.
Firstly though, I’d like to extend a little bit of gratitude, and there is so much to give.
To those who have cooked meals for us these past few months, thank you. To those who helped my father, brother and I navigate three months of medical complications, emotional highs and emotional lows, thank you. To those who sat with my mother while my father and I took the time for self-care, thank you… and to the medical staff who put in every ounce of effort to try and help my mother in the best way they knew how, thank you… thank you all, so very, very much.
Most of all, for those that lived a life beside her, relatives and friends who enriched my mother’s life with warmth and love, just as she surely enriched yours too, thank you. No matter how big or how small those moments were, you have my unending gratitude.
Okay, I’ve stalled enough… so, why am I writing this, and at this exact moment? Simple, because an obituary does not do my mother any justice. A blurb is not enough for any soul, and it could never be fitting… not in my eyes. Cliche as it is, this is a tale as old as time. Death, and its relative normalcy in the grand universe is perhaps the cruelest thing of all.
Death so rarely gives. Often, it only takes, much like a thief. It forces the living to contend with such a raw magnitude of emotional realities, and unrelentingly so. Humanity holds the burden to come up with our own peace of mind; be it through a faith-based system, or some other means. Cobbling together what rests beyond life itself, we make our peace with innumerable and immeasurable factors unknown to us. We find our own ways to explain the near inexplicable.
For me, this is my means of catharsis. If someone else gains even an ounce of comfort from these stories and fond memories, all the better… but, I don’t want those stories to be told just because my mother has passed away.
I want them to be told because they’re worth telling, and that began long before now.
I start this post on March 3… or should I say March 4th of 2025? It’s 12:11 A.M. and the night is dark. The hours are equally like a void, long and tedious. I just don’t even know where to start. The beginning, I suppose, but what even is that? The day I was born? The day my mother was? What time-line best encapsulates an existence that touched the hearts and minds of so many people? I say an obituary can’t do my mother any justice, but this blog post can’t either.
Let’s go with March 4th…
I find myself laughing at my own futility right now. Truly laughing at it, because writing is the only medium where I can reasonably express myself at all. If I were to say any of this aloud, it would only fail spectacularly. You can go right ahead and blame that on my emotional constipation, I wouldn’t fault you. Call it a vice of mine, I’m not likely to change my stripes any time soon.
I do find it strange. It is uncanny, and even funny how my late cousin Dee comes to mind during these times the most. Which, I suppose, leads me to my first story. I’ve told this one before, and if you care to care to hear it in full, the link is there is all of its glory, or lack-there-of.
Note: My cousin was biologically female, assigned at birth. My cousin also subverted gender normality mentally in every way humanly possible. The line between a non-binary identity crossed heavily…
To make it short though, my cousin and I were whittling away a few hours outside, and we were waxing philosophical, as we often tended to do. We talked about everything and nothing that way. Then my cousin says to me “Okay smartass, how do you make a brick?” and at the time we didn’t know. Like always, we looked up the answer, which is really quite simple… the how’s and why’s don’t matter. All that matters is the ethos I’m about to present to you.
I ask you now, why do you think that question matters? Why would that story apply here?
Well, I also found out in retrospect that it takes roughly 8,176 bricks to make a home. Like always, the poetic soul that my cousin was, and that I also tend to be, we made a metaphor out of it. If the heart is the home, then we lay down bricks one-by-one to cultivate what we deem worthy for that house to hold. Without that, it’s just four walls with nothing in them. If you don’t shape those bricks, let them dry, lay down one-by-one, you won’t have a home.
Now, some might call that idea pompous, and I wouldn’t even argue that statement. You know, it probably is, at least a little…
Yet, I can tell you conclusively that my parents lived their lives together doing exactly that; laying down brick-after-brick and forging memory-after-memory. My mother and father met in the 8th grade through mutual friends, eventually becoming high school sweet-hearts. They married, and went several long years wishing for children of their own; a difficult struggle. Eventually, they adopted my brother, and seven years after adopting him, I was born.
My parents lived the entirety of their adult lives together. My mother will inevitably leave behind that same loving husband, and his stories are his to tell. That makes the point though, these stories shared here are just a few of the vast many that could be told, and this is only one drop in the bucket.
First Though, Time for Small Truths
I went to bed after typing the above paragraph, and the time is now 8:45 A.M, still March 4th. This whole roller coaster ride started on December 6th, but that final month of 2024 now stands in a haze of exhaustion and endless beeping from ICU monitors. January brought with it the new year, and a sourly new routine. For the past two months, this is how the start of my day looks. No matter what time I went to bed the night before, I dragged myself out of bed at 8:30 in the morning. We’re up at the long term care facility by 10:00 A.M. This cycle is relentless.
We stay a few hours with my mother, leave to get a break, do whatever we need to do, and return for a few hours in the evening. When we come home, we find some way to kill the restless and exhausting evening ahead of us. Going to bed, only to wake up the next day, you do the same thing; a groundhog day. You hurry-up, and then you wait. These days, I find myself losing track of time quickly.
One hour goes by too fast to catch, another trickles by slower than a dung beetle rolls a turd up an impossibly steep slope. In short, this routine disgusts me. It’s all the proof I need, showcasing my immeasurable yet incredibly powerless nature against the ultimate truths of this world.
Rinse, repeat, over-and-over, a break in that routine is often desperately needed, but equally, very little sought after. With a resounding and fastidious resolve, my father abides this routine much the same as I do, because a failure to have done so before, would be equal to giving up.
I say this not to be inherently negative, but to acknowledge two things.
Firstly, sometimes a break in the routine becomes like a gavel crashing down. If things go as planned today, the gear for mom’s hospice care will actually arrive. I’ll be staying home awaiting the bed and materials under a tenderly kept, yet somewhat twisted hope that it all goes according to plan. If it does, then my mother should come home tomorrow, on March 5th… I don’t know how to feel about that.
Relief? Grief? Peace? Outrage and anger towards a higher power, no matter what powers that be? I don’t know, I seriously just don’t… but, I must admit, an emotional numbness and mild shock comes along with my second detail that must be acknowledged.
I can’t help but wonder how some people end up in much longer loops than the one I just described, or the turmoil and trauma that it causes. The strength required, the mental fortitude, those aren’t things that are not, and never could be bought and sold on the cheap. Even in my own family there are saga-style stories that go on for months, if not a year or more. If you’re the kind of person who ran an emotional gauntlet like this for so long, you have my respect and somewhat bitter admiration.
Let that much at least, be known… but I digress, onto happier things, like our first memorial story.
Recalling Duck Lake – Swimmer Itch and Smashed Nuts
This is a story that anyone who was there will likely never forget, and even those who weren’t there would have heard this story at least half a dozen times. On the surface, it was the vacation from hell, truth be told. Picture it: one very hot summer, two ramshackle cabins (with dead mice included), and a tornado deciding to make an appearance on a little lake in Michigan… now from that description, which I assure you is far from a conflation of the facts, you might assume we hated it.
Actually, it’s one of my most memorable vacations in my early life.
Fun fact about warm sand bottom lakes. Fresh water can harbor parasites that can induce a skin rash that is both blotchy and annoying. Yes, it’s itchy, very itchy. Being very hot makes the itching much worse. Almost everyone aside from my Uncle Tim, my great aunt (Henceforth known as “Great”) and my great uncle came down with swimmer itch.
Like fools the rest of us went swimming with reckless abandon, unknowing the parasite would be in the water. We were covered in head-to-toe with the itch.
I have vivid memories of my mother, my Aunt Cathy and I going into the nearest big-box store we could find, and we sprayed ourselves down with almost anything we could get our hands on. NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING stopped this itch. The adults had to get creative with how to entertain us, and they came up with a great many ways to do so.
My uncle and my father hauled a big wooden toy-animal-thing down to the water’s edge to regale us with stories of “Ducky the Sea Monster” during the late night campfires. The women of the family pulled a prank on my uncle when he stepped on some kind of nut shell; they told him it was a chipmunk (no chipmunks were harmed!). My mother would bribe us not to scratch with sweets and snacks. I got to have more chocolate and ice cream on that vacation than any other vacation ever.
She kept running up to the store to get ice, because cool baths and towels wrapped in ice helped relive the itch for a short time. When the tornado came by, they took us all bowling, and that place had air conditioning. That helped stop the itchiness a little bit too. I think Duck Lake was the one vacation that my mother and I spent the most time away from the cabins, at least to my memory. My mom would take me for a car ride every day just to explore the area, all because of the air conditioning.
When we got home, my mother, father, brother and I all got out of the car and jumped into our pool with the clothes we came home in. To me, that made swimming so much more fun, because swimming in anything besides a bathing suit was a novelty. Several other relatives came by for an impromptu pool party and did the same thing. We ended up ordering pizza from a place we called “Jimmy’s”. The chlorine pretty much killed off the itch that evening… the next day it was hardly there at all.
Duck Lake really could have turned into a vacation from hell, but my family is fairly good at finding levity and making the best out of bad situations. My mother was exceptionally good at it, and she could find a silver lining in almost anything…
Magic through the Mundane…
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” – William Shakespeare.
They may say that brevity is the soul of wit, but I knew I would not be brief nor witty when typing this downright idiotic attempt to chronicle my mother’s life. Again, I make no mistake, I understand just how useless this word explosion may look to an outside observer, In truth, many of my actions often reduce down to pure idiocy. Although, in my defense, I never once claimed to be intelligent.
In fact, I’ve done many stupid things in my life, including “forking” my own yard… for those who don’t know what that is, it’s when you stab a bunch of forks into the ground and cover the handles in lard… actually now that I think about it, that was also partially Dee’s fault. You’d be correct to assume we had to then remove the mess, once my parents found out.
In moments like that “forking” incident, my mother would roll her eyes at us and say “If you were smart, you’d be dangerous”. To a point, she really wasn’t wrong. She would also lovingly (and uselessly) threaten us with her shoe when we drove her absolutely crazy. Now, an outsider may think poorly of that… until they realize that many of my family are towering giants compared to her. She’s only five feet tall, ranking number three when it comes to the shortest people in the entire family.
A great many moments of havoc ensued when growing up. From setting portions of the grass on fire by accident with sparklers in our younger years, to making entire firework domino courses all the way up and down the drive way as adults. When it came to the 4th of July parties we had a real blast… when we weren’t acting like miniature pyromaniacs, we were making entire “jackass” style obstacle courses in the swimming pool. My brother and I were true blue 80’s and 90’s kids, able to infuriate my father with our nonsense on any given day, and often effortlessly doing so.
My mother was the moderate mind to my father’s incredibly stressful job, and the fact he would come home to my brother and I acting like complete lunatics… failing that, he came home to a mess, because kids are messy people… she often called us “a mess a minute”, and that wasn’t a falsehood.
Looking back, my babysitters kept me highly entertained growing up. However, it wasn’t without a price. If there wasn’t some gigantic display of empty soda cans reaching the ceiling, or some twisted science experiment making our swimming pool multicolored, then it was my brother who was the baby sitter. If that was the case my parents could guarantee I had skipped my bedtime. The room with the television set would be an explosion of video games. Sega, Nintendo and Super Nintendo alike, if not the N46 games as well… more than a few times, mom would just sit down and play with us late into the night.
All of this to say, my mother is a saint. She managed a household of three difficult people to contend with, hard-heads with clashing natures. We were a household filled with love, but that doesn’t mean we were always easy people to live with. Somehow she would manage to get two different meals down onto the table most nights, because my brother and I were fairly picky eaters.
When my brother and I were grown, I was given the luck to see that ethos get passed on to the generation beneath me. When she became a grandmother, that unending patience and loving spirit that warmed our hearts showed in spades… along with the common sense that so often eluded my brother and I. That brings me to my next story.
Can I have Trees?
My brother had no experience with young children, and he was learning how to be a new dad to a young and rambunctious toddler. That’s not an easy feat, tossed into the experience head-first the way he had been. Now, for context, the only green vegetable that we would ever willingly eat growing up was green beans. When my nephew asked “Can I have Trees?” my brother was perplexed… my nephew meant the broccoli. We hated broccoli growing up, my brother and I both.
Rather logically my brother said “You’re not going to like that”. I hadn’t said anything, but I was in silent agreement. Unbothered by my brother’s confusion, or my mild hesitancy, our parents took over. They jumped at the opportunity to have a child around that actually liked trying food. My parents, side-by-side at the table were all too willing to get my nephew to love vegetables.
My mother was in her hay-day, fawning over the broccoli and entertaining his young whims… and guess what? He ate it, and he actually liked it.
Now this might sound mundane to you, a non-important thing to toss here in this blog post, but it highlights a key detail about my mother. To her, those little moments mattered. For all of the grandiose things this family got up to over the years, including flying out to Florida for my cousin’s Disney wedding, it was the little joys in life that I think my mother cherished the most.
The lazy summer days by the pool, and the countless impromptu family gatherings that resulted in sleepovers are too numerous to name. The same would be true of playing Super Mario and Bomber Man with my brother and I. She made the habit of taking my great aunt to every dollar store in the radius, on the regular. Those things might have been tedious for anyone else, but not my mother. She genuinely loved going out to lunch, or just watching television with my father…
I can tell you for fact, right up until she got sick, my mother and father could spend an entire afternoon puttering around, or watching the world pass them by.
The list of the mundane moments I could name goes on-and-on-and-on… but, the echoes of my upbringing also echo in my niece and nephew. I’m sure he will fondly recall the hours of “Pokemon Go!”, and each and every park we stopped at when he came up to visit during the summer months. My Niece will likely recall the long shopping trips that my mother always planned out, hitting all the stores, even if it was just to window-shop.
To be honest, I won’t forget it either. Life is very cyclical that way… in another way, video games are an interesting hallmark in this family.
Our Princess is in Another Castle…
This wouldn’t be a “TDF” blog post without defaulting to geekdom, and for that I’m sorry. However, it would be worthy to note that video games didn’t start with me in this family, far from it. While I wasn’t even around for this incident (I hadn’t even been born yet), my mother often tells the story of my brother playing the Original Super Mario Bros. game on Nintendo. It took him weeks to get to level 1-4.
Any veteran gamer out there knows; that the first Bowser encounter… and if you are a veteran gamer, you probably already know how this story goes. For us, it’s a touchstone unlike any other.
My brother struggled, as many of us struggled to get to that point in the game, and hearing the victory music and seeing Toad jumping up and down happily, he thought he beat the game… until he saw that fated text “I’m sorry, but our princess is in another castle”.
Apparently he was so mad when the next level 2-1 displayed across the screen, he was incredibly agitated and mildly horrified that there could be harder levels to begin with. In later years, she would tell this story hundreds of times, a fond recollection of the hobby she shared with us.
However, it highlights to me that my love of gaming was fostered early, not completely by my brother, but the woman who shared that love of gaming with us. As my mother got older, she could no longer play platformers, but that didn’t stop her from playing games Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing on the GameCube… she was a true blue-gamer, and not of the mobile-gaming type we’d usually assume our mothers become. No, she was the Nintendo fan.
Long after she reached her 70’s, she still didn’t stop interacting with games. Although she stopped playing them, she didn’t stop watching them. Retro gaming and the speed running community became something she enjoyed watching, even if she didn’t interact with the chat. I’ve lost count of how many Twitch streams she watched, or how many times she would go back and watch the old GTLive episodes with Matpat and Step doing things like the condiment, baby food, and marshmallow challenges… she really liked watching those. She’d ask me to find those videos for her a few times a year.
As for us here at The Demented Ferrets, every now and then, I’d hear one of the archived Crash Bandicoot or Donkey Kong Country live streams playing from her iPad… I never did tell Kresh how much she’d laugh at us when we played Tomb Raider, or Monkey Island.
At the time it seemed so inconsequential… my mother watching one of our live streams? That’s no big deal, right? There’s not much to say about it.
Now though, I find it very difficult to pick up a controller without my mind jumping to her immediately. I doubt I’ll ever be able to play an old Super Nintendo game again without all the memories flooding back to me. Every “game over” screen we ran into, and every time we farmed extra lives in Yoshi’s Island.
For me, those are the most special moments of mundane life that I will never forget… magic through the mundane is probably the one thing I picked up from her personality.
March 5th – Mom Came Home
Yesterday the gear came, and today mom arrived at the house. At least now she’ll get to spend her final days in the comfort of her own home with loved ones surrounding her. I don’t know that she completely understands that she’s in hospice care. Then again, I’m not sure I want her to know all the details either. I want her to spend whatever time she has on this earth happily, not worrying about whatever might be called an afterlife. She spent most of her day talking and watching television, she was much more lucid today than usual too.
On days like these, you want to have hope in miracles, even though you know she’ll never really recover. She’s too weak for that, but I’ll happily take what little good comes from the days she’s got left. At the time of writing this, it’s late at night. Dad and I should be sleeping, but mom’s in a chatty mood. Some of it makes sense, some of it doesn’t. She asked to see the cat before bedtime.
March 6th – That Which isn’t Perfect
I think I got about two hours of sleep last night before mom’s morning bed adjustment and clean-up. Dad and I have bad backs and shoulders, so both of us exhausted ourselves. We managed to accomplish our task though. Then I took a pain killer and took a nap to catch up on lost sleep. I never got around to telling any stories yesterday, and I can’t say I feel the need to regale anyone with any stories at the moment, either. It’s 11:00 A.M. and she has spent most of the morning sleeping.
I find myself thinking about all the times she took care of me. Scrapped knees, common colds, flu, strep throat, bronchitis… an endless list of minor injuries and ailments over the years that you’d expect any child to catch. I suppose these memories are demarcated purely by the passage of time, and the fact that now the roles have switched.
As a young child, I used to collect my pillow and lean against her for hours in front of the television. We’d watch television pretty much all day, and I’d fade in and out of sleep that way. We’d watch old shows, things like M.A.S.H. and I love Lucy, Golden Girl marathons and The Nanny. As long as we weren’t watching game shows, I was happy with that…
I wish I could say that all of this feels reciprocal as an adult, but truly all I feel is a sense of inadequacy. That feeling not only pisses me off, it makes me feel an ounce of resentment about the fact that I never will be the sort of person my mother was. I’m not as emotionally strong as my mother, I’m not as kind, as giving or as patient. I get drained whenever I’m around the entire situation for too long. There’s seriously nothing that I can do… I’ll continue this entry later.
It’s now 4:45 PM.
I come to my corner and just want to sit here, and then my father come in here while typing this up and says “Okay mom’s awake, just in case you want to come out and sit here with her.” The only thing I can do is sit here and think; Uhhh, well NO SHIT, Sherlock! if I wanted to be out there, I’d BE OUT THERE…. she’s in the living room for goodness sake (any of you who know me, also know there’s a plethora of four letter words flooding my mind at the moment).
Yet, it highlights my point. I was around a CNA, a Nurse, a social worker, and one of my aunts all day… if that makes me sound like a terrible person that I just want to be alone right now, well, then I don’t know what to tell you… I called my mother a saint, I never promised I’d be one too.
At the moment my mother knows what I am, but I doubt my mother knows who I am, and those distinctions make all the difference to my level of *wished for* exposure. She hasn’t said my actual name in weeks. All I hear from medical professionals is how “brave” and “loving” and “caring” we are as a family for choosing to use this route for hospice care… bringing her home and trying to take care of her ourselves… but, news flash. That’s not the compliment they think it to be.
If anything, it only highlights just how entirely fucked up the world is that someone as selfish as myself sees this as the bare minimum I can do after having been raised by her. I mean seriously, what’s the alternative? Ignore her in some facility? Dump her off on the side of the road? I’m asking that honestly. What in the heck do people do to their loved ones on the regular?
Anyway, I’m going to wrap this up here and go sit in the living room and fake my way through pretending to be happy for Mom’s sake… maybe i’ll fake it until I make that happiness real, for at least a couple short hours… I’ll return to update later.
Okay… invisible time-skip to you, but for me several hours. It’s later in the evening now, 8:00 P.M. Mom’s napping. She might be asleep for the night for all that I know, but I’ve personally lost my appetite to eat dinner. Honestly? I’m just tired… I’m going to go to bed and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is a new day.
March 7th – A Bit of Generational Advice
Mom had a lot of visitors today. Two nieces, a cousin, her sister and sister-in-law all came by today for a visit around the same time. We made a little party out of it. There was lots of laughter. Also, mom begrudgingly got her nails done. She needed to get them trimmed, and finally she let one of my cousins do it for her. Moments like these make me reflect on the family I never got to meet.
See, my parents were significantly older when they had me. My mother was 40, so as a result, there are a lot of stories and family members that I only know about second-hand. They were gone long before I was born. As everyone reminisced, I did what I always do. I listened to the tall tales that could only ever be stories to me. I don’t have any personal recollection of them, and to be honest, some of those stories seem larger than life.
Without plenty of family members left to corroborate those memories, it would be hard to think they were true… but, I suppose you know that old saying about truth being stranger than fiction. Speaking of old sayings, it shouldn’t be a shocker to think that sage words of wisdom get passed around more times than not as well.
My mother used to always say to me that “We all need to go to hell in our own way”. Apparently that’s something her father used to tell her. Honestly, the way she used to say it, and the candor in which she did is something that I’ll miss the most. That line resonates with me now the most. I have a lot of regrets about things I could have, and should have handled differently when it came to my mother. Then again hindsight is 20/20, and as they always say; the road paved to hell is paved with the best of intentions.
I don’t know what I believe, and I really wonder how there could be a place like hell that is somehow worse than the evils found here on earth. Either way, those two quotes come to mind as I try to navigate the complex internal workings of my mind. Mom hasn’t even passed on yet, but the eventual conclusion is so steadfast in my mind as inevitable. She’s not eating or drinking, after all…. and she’s just too weak to get better, which was why we chose hospice in the first place.
I just don’t know quite what to do with myself. I guess I’ll reminisce a little…
Theme Park Junkies…
When I was a teenager, my mother and I would take a summer trip almost every year, just the two of us. It would be someplace within the state, and fairly local, but we’d be gone for at least four or five days, if not a whole week. My mother called us theme park junkies because we’d end up at places like Cedar Point or Michigan Adventure. We liked to people-watch and ride the water rides and wooden coasters. Mom wasn’t a huge fan of anything with dangling feet, or upside-down loops.
One year though, we wanted a change of pace. It was an unseasonably cool summer, and that turned out to be very lucky for us. We went up north to Mackinac Island. We booked our hotel in the actual city on the mainland because it was cheaper. We got breakfast at Big Boy every day. Between hitting every fudge shop in the radius, walking the flower gardens, and making a pit stop at a heated water park, it was probably the best vacation we took on our own.
I vividly recall sitting on the shoreline that looks between Lake Michigan and Lake Heron, two of the Great Lakes surrounding Michigan. The Mackinac Bridge sits smack-dab in the middle between the two. We would sit and watch the freighters going by while eating lunch, talking about everything and nothing. Summers like that were best spent lazily, and usually we didn’t have a firm itinerary.
No matter where we ended up, or what our goal was, we would meander our way back home after the week was done lazily. Vacations with my mother and I were never rushed. We took our time, and idled around, and those are the moments I miss the most. Hours spent on beaches and water-fronts watching the boats drifting upon the glistening water, you just can’t put a price on that.
March 8th: A Very Sleepless Night
It’s 2:15, and we’ve just gotten mom to fall asleep. She was speaking nonsense and calling out for her sister, aunts and uncles that are long gone, and her childhood cat named “Blacky” (or is it Blackie? No idea how they spelled it. Eh, it doesn’t much matter.). To get mom to relax we tried two different meds (several hours apart, of course), and tried playing soft classical music. She finally fell back to sleep, for how long this time, who knows? She’s becoming less and less coherent at night, and it’s hard to listen to.
For now, I’m going back to sleep, and hopefully I’ll have better news to report.
Annnnnd I’m Back! For you this paragraph is a blink of an eye. For me, it’s late and several hours have passed. Two of my cousins came by today, they’ll be staying over for a slumber party tonight. On top of that we had a full house of extended family, and my mom’s sister and sister-in-law. I couldn’t really relate to the stories being told and the reminiscing that went on at the time. That’s due to the generational age divide, that makes sense. Mom was happy, though.
I don’t think she followed every conversation, but she would smile and listen.
March 9th: Silence Begins
Mom slept for most of the day. She’s being kept comfortable, and claims she’s not in any pain. She’s sleeping a lot though, which is, in a way more difficult to see than when she’s active. This is the first day where my mother actually “looks like” she’s going to pass away. Ever since coming home, she’s looked frail, or she has looked incredibly tired. Even with those qualities, she was usually awake for most of the day, more or less happy to just be home. It seems as though now her waking hours will begin to dwindle, and she’ll probably just nap unaware of her surroundings (more or less).
It’s hard not to count the hours, both dreading and anticipating the inevitable. On the one hand, you never want a loved one to suffer. On the other hand, if that’s all prolonging life guarantees then you wouldn’t want that outcome either… I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, it’s a vicious cycle.
I wonder what she’s thinking, if anything in particular. I wonder if she knows what’s happening to her yet? If she does actually comprehend it, is she at peace with it? I’m sure the comfortable thing to believe is that my mother has little to no ability to truly contemplate the concept of mortality. I don’t know if I believe that, though… in fact, I’m not sure I believe much at all right now… as though I’m surviving purely on the basis of tangible facts, rather than theory.
March 10th – I’m not Sure What to Say…
Mom’s taking morphine once an hour, and she’ll likely fade fast at this point. For now, she’s just sleeping more than anything else. As a family, there’s already enough anticipatory grief to go around. I sit here looking at the plethora of words upon the screen, none of them doing the raw justice of these events, and I know that nothing will. Honesty is far from a comfort. Still, I know we’ve made the right decision. There is no other outcome that would have been a kindness.
I tell myself that I am the pragmatist, and frankly I am, at least when it comes to situations like this one. I’m resigned to it, and that soon this blog post will be posted in its completely imperfect form, and lacking so much. Such is life, an imperfect balance of all things. I am not the warmest person by far, honestly I have the temperament of a pit viper on occasion. I wish I could drum up some measure of warmth in me now to join the others sitting around the bedside and chatting in the living room. Instead, I sit out in my garage with a cigarette in my hand fully realizing that as time draws near, so too does an ounce of peace for my very exhausted mind.
I do wish mom had been able to live long enough to see my ambitions come to fruition in a way that satisfied. I wish I had something to show my over-achiever family, who all find successes even amidst their personal failings. I wish more could be done than sitting here typing up this stupid thing… because, really, who is going to read this?
Yet, my mother was, even now is, an indomitable spirit. She and my father paved a way and carved out a life that was full of love and tenderness. In the exhaustive spiral that is grief, so too with it comes a sense of dark, almost sickeningly sweet calm. I can listen to the traffic roaring in the distance, hear the birds in the trees, and I can make peace with the fact that there will be no more slow days between my mother and I, idled away for a lack of something better to do.
If anything, it can be a very good thing to be bored. Right now, I feel that sense of boredom mixing and mingling with everything else, and selfishly I’m eager to get back into my routines.
My mind right now drifts to one of my idols, Monty Oum (may he also be resting in peace these days), creator of the RWBY series. When his own mother passed he made a lengthy post about his thoughts and feelings about her passing and subsequent funeral. I find myself reading those old posts now as well, trying to glean what little insight his creative works and processes gave us as a fan base… and as I’ve always said, I’m a fan of fandom. He found a measure of peace within his mother’s passing. Driven and focused as he was, he found a renewed sense-of-self after that dark time… and I’m hoping I’ll be able to do the same. In some ways, I already have.
My mother was my largest emotional support in my life, and losing her is nothing but a struggle I’ll have to contend with. Still, what The Demented Ferrets represents to me only grows stronger.
Just Say Thank You…
Before everything went to hell in a handbag over the holiday season the cheer and Christmas shopping was alive and well during November and very early December. My mother helped me order a new laptop, we went half-and-half on the cost… it was my Christmas present. She was going to be spending a little more than usual on gifts last year, so the gift money covered the cost I couldn’t completely afford out of my own pocket.
I was speechless at the time, and brought to happy tears with gratitude. I told her that I didn’t know what to say, which at the time was true. She told me to just say thank you… which I did, several times over. The laptop arrived December 6th, the same day this long several month downward spiral started. She never got to see the laptop, but I do ultimately wonder if she knew she was getting weaker.
How do you say “thank you” for everything? Quite literally everything? I really have no idea. I couldn’t say it enough before, I can’t say it enough now.
Thank you, for everything…
March 11th – Rest in Peace
The clock strikes midnight on this incredibly sleepless night. Then it strikes another several hours, and in the gentle hours of early morning long before sunrise my mother slipped away peacefully. We wouldn’t have even noticed her final breaths if we hadn’t been watching for them. It looks as though she were truly sleeping even as her body eventually completely relaxed. Her final breath was so small it was barely there at all. Her eyes were closed, and of course, as a family we wept.
The people from the crematorium will be coming to get mom later on today…
March 12th – The Retrospective
The day after my mother’s passing is a day of quiet introspection mixed with some routine. The coffee in the pot is warm and fresh, but the house is quiet. Small conversations slip by to fill the void of a quiet house. Dad pays the bills, I do some sprucing up. We wait for the people to get the hospice bed and equipment they didn’t pick up the day before… they will be here sometime this afternoon.
My heart hurts, yet I’m not sad. My head is running endlessly, but I’m not depressed. I’m restless, but my mind turns to plans for the days ahead. The required “adulting” and chores that I need to do, and the mandatory content that will come to TDF’s YouTube page and Live Streams come to mind. I want to think of the future, not to bury the past… but rather because the past, present, and future must co-exsist.
Then again, so must joy and sadness. I do grieve my mother, short bursts of tears find their way into my customary existence and have for a few days. Things I would do for her throughout the day no longer need to be done. I grieve the second I’m reminded of a task that no longer needs doing. That flood of grief is short-lived as I recollect myself and move onto the next thing. I have no desire to crumple into a corner and cry for hours on end… I don’t feel compelled to even let myself do that.
Instead, I want her loss to be a motivation to me. I want to feel as though everything I’ve done for her, everything I *could* do for her has been achieved for better and worse, messily so, and always incomplete. What I can do now is continue on with my own life and my own ambitions so that maybe I really will have something to show for it… something the outside world understands as “success”, but failing that at least I will stay true to myself this way.
Linda Marie Baroli was born in 1949 and lived to the age of 75. Together with an older sister, they grew up partners in sibling love and rivalry in the only way that siblings ever can. She married her high school sweetheart, and stayed loyal to him when he was sent out during the Vietnam War. During the good and the bad, they muddled through anything life threw at them. In later years, together with that loving husband she raised two children, a son and a daughter. She was an aunt to many, a great aunt to several, and a grandmother of two. She was the levity to our bullshit, and the sarcastic if mellow mind to this family and our endless supply of loving if chaotic bullshit.
That little blurb of a paragraph says so much, and yet so little all at the same time. This entire blog post is the same way. She was my mother… at the end of the day, that’s all I can really say… she was my mother, one of my best friends, the one I would confide in and fight with. She was the one I would lean on the most emotionally when times grew difficult, and the one I turned to for advice when I felt lost…
I loved her, I will always love her, and I hope she rests in peace.
The Demented Ferrets 