What's It Like To Be With Someone as They Die?

I wanted to know what it was going to be like.
I knew my mother was most likely going to die at home--in my home.

I had only experienced death in a hospital setting. Different animal.

Living with dying and death is something I had to learn how to do.

In that order. Dying is sometimes a slow process.
Dying is aching, doubting, hoping.
Death is final.

I wrote about my mother’s death in Mothering Mother.
I wrote about it moment-by-moment. I wrote it that way–sitting beside her, journal in hand. A word, or thought, or phrase that represented hours, days, and weeks as my mother took her “good old time.”

She made sure I didn’t miss a thing.
And I didn’t. I glued myself there.

I was scared. Didn’t know if I could do it.
But as we got there–almost three years of her living (and dying) with me as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s took its toll, I found that I was ready.
I had to be there. Follow through. Finish what I promised.

I wrote about it because I could find so little on it.
So little about something we all must do.
Sorry to be so morbid here, but I think it’s important.
Our society is so youth oriented that we don’t look at the full picture–birth to death.

Death was so much a part of people’s lives in the dark ages that they came up with a Latin phrase they used to write over their doors.

Momento Mori. It means, “We all must die.”
It’s known in literature to denote “symbols” of death–black, the skull, the sickle, etc. It dates back to the Roman times, to a general who had a slave walk behind him as he paraded down the streets celebrating his latest victory. The slave would call out, “Momento mori!” Meaning, look behind you, you are but a mortal.

We tend to remember the Carpe Diem version,“Seize the Day!”
It’s the end of “Eat, Drink and Be Merry,” we forget,“for tomorrow ye may die.”

Heavy stuff, I know. But if you’re about to face this, as I had to face this, you might be ready for a frank discussion

That’s why I say we look at it in February and leave the frivolity for May.
We have to incorporate living and dying into our lives in a healthy way. To embrace, and let go, and embrace again.

Readers of Mothering Mother know about my push and pull, mother-daughter relationship. But there was so much that occured before then. Relationships are difficult to translate to the page. So much history, so many tangles and layers.

It took a long time to get to that place–the love, forgiveness, acceptance place. And then, when I finally stopped trying to “fix” us, we were well into the dying process.

We tend to hero-ize or villanize people in our lives.
Good and evil, wicked witch, white knight.
Especially when we’re young–everyone falls into one category or another. The ambiguities and juxtapositions of life come over time.

Daddy was my hero.
I needed one, and he did a good job filling it.
But that made his passing deeper, and bitter-sweet.
Grieving is not only about the five stages of grief. (Kubler Ross–denial anger, barganing, depreesion and acceptance).

We think we can check them off like a grocery list.
No, it’s a circle. We keep going round and round, double back, get stuck, leap frog, only to find ourselves back at square one. But each time we rail against, drown in it, we’ve made progress. Minute progress.

~Carol D. O’Dell
Author of Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
available on Amazon and in most bookstores
http://www.mothering-mother.com/
Kunati Publishing
~Carol D. O’Dell
Author of Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
available on Amazon and in most bookstores
http://www.mothering-mother.com/
http://www.kunati.com/

Care Giving--Care Receiving

We've now turned the words "Care Giver" into a compound word.
Caregiver or caregiving is now written as one word.
Two words smeared together. Apropos. Two lives smeared together.

A Jackson Pollack painting is a great metaphor for Alzheimer's--layers of chaos--some beautiful, others haunting.

I wrote in my book, MOTHERING MOTHER that I thought that caregiving was such a sterile term. Mother has bonded well with her child makes me want to ask if bail has been posted.

I used to teach my daughters that family was an acronym for "Father and Mother, I Love You." It sounded really sweet when they were four and five years old.... Now they roll their eyes and give me a smirk.

Now I have a new word--Care Receiver.It's a two-worder. It looks funny as one word:Carereceiver. Care-receiver.

I prefer, "Loved One."

I'd like to be referred to as the loved one--the one who is loved.

Giving and receiving are reciprocal terms.Someone smiles, the other tears...or just sighs.
m
Carol D. O'Dell, author of Mothering Mother, available at Amazon

Mothering Mother--The Truth Behind the Book

Mothering Mother is my first book. It's my first book published, not the first book I wrote. Like most writers, I have a couple of "dry runs" in the desk drawer. Mothering Mother was published first because I needed to understand myself and my role as daughter, mother, wife and woman. And if I needed it, I knew others did as well.
After seven years of writing and publishing, my own artistic journey was put on hold as my mother moved in. Caregiving is all encompassing and I didn't have enough brain cells to create fiction. So, I did what an artist does.
I turned my surrounding, my present condition into my art. Artists have to create. Boundaries create channels for energy. What I thought was a set back to my writing and my artist self turned out not to be a set back after all.
It wasn't easy either. Writing (or eating, bathing, having a life whatsoever) wasn't easy around my mother. She could suck the air out of tornado. I had to fight for any moment for myself.

I wrote in snatches for over two years--I'd run to the computer and type in a few lines. I'd write on the back of an envelope and stuff in my pocket. I wrote in my thoughts. The irony was that I was too tired to edit my thoughts. I told the truth--the raw, honest, gutsy, imperfect truth. Because I was too exhausted and frustrated not to.

Artists struggle with how to create art in the midst of life and reponsibilities. We struggle with how to tell, to show the truth. We struggle with how to be authentic and how to create beauty, clarity, flow and insight. We do that best when we don't (or can't) get in our own way.
.