Code Blue

Thursday, January 11, 2007 9:40 PM

Continued from http://www.fireflyfans.net/showblog.asp?b=5870

Two weeks after my 15th birthday my mother got the flu. She slept a lot. She didn’t go in to work on Friday and was sick all weekend long. Sunday night I woke her for her favorite show. She was too sick to watch. I set the alarm early and went to bed. When I got up the next morning, I woke her up to see how she was, no real change. I called my grandparents who would make the trek to our house and see to her while I got myself ready for school and marched out the door into the snow, quietly snickering to myself about “when I was a kid I walked five miles to school in the snow.” When I got home my mother was in the hospital. Three hours later, I found her not breathing, lips blue as we had stepped out of the room for just a little break. Another two hours and they stabilized her on a respirator.

She spent the next five days in a coma. Ours was a small hospital and didn’t have a brain scan machine (EEG) and she couldn’t be moved so we had to wait for the machine to be brought in. She would never wake from the coma. Could never wake. So my grandparents had their life taken away from them. After all they had endured. After all my mother had lived through, it was all over now. So while I had no legal standing, no authority by any definition. All eyes turned toward me to see what should be done. The laws concerning advanced directives were still years from being formulated let alone enacted. She could live like she was indefinitely with no hope of recovery, or they could let her die. We could let her die. I could let her die. That’s what they wanted to know from me. What did I want to do. I was fifteen years old. And two weeks.

There really was no decision in my mind, just like there was no activity in hers. Turn off the machines. My great uncle went in with the medical staff to be an observer. He later wrote about the experience which helped me greatly. As I was the only composed one left, I went to tell my great aunt, who was like a sister to my mother in many ways, that my mother was no more. I didn’t have to say anything.

Next came the funeral arrangements and all the bullshit that goes along with that. In some ways it is a good thing that grief leaves you in a fog during these times so that the bullshit smell doesn’t overwhelm you. Of course I made all the decisions. And then, life resumed. A colorless, dull existence carried us along for years.

Of course things got better and you now see the happy go lucky quipster before you now. I am saddened that so much of my memories about my mother surround the last week of her life, overshadowing everything else that she was. Remarkable, loving and lovely.

So, I look back on my own life now knowing that (a few months hence) everything that I have to look forward to is something that my mother never had a chance to see. She’d be 79 now and that does not compute with the images I have of her in my head. Eternally younger than 50. Forevermore, younger than me.

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