The Passing Of Mom

 My mother passed away yesterday.  She managed to just slip past her birthday to 84 years.

Apparently the home she was in called my sister and let her know she had evidenced some problems breathing - and suddenly, she was gone.

I went to see her when I was home two weeks ago.  

In going, I knew she had been having health issues.  On my arrival that week, my sister let me know that she had fallen twice and was essentially unable to walk, even with our assistance - something that was not true 4 months ago.  The home had asked my sister to start buying nutritional drinks for her as she was not eating well; recently she would only take her food pureed. 

My visit this time was no different than they had been in the last few months:  my mother was awake (although just as often in the last few months she was asleep) and staring off into the distance.  She would not make eye contact and may or may not have been aware that I was even there.

I had become used to this, of course.  The first time or two it was disconcerting, but I had simply learned to just talk on.  And so this time - as in months past - I said hi and updated her on how the family was doing, where The Ravishing Mrs. TB was off to and what the grandchildren were up to, and what I was up to.  I finished with telling her I loved her, and was on my way.

I was probably there 5 minutes all told.  Even then, the gauntness of her frame (96 lbs. from a recent medical visit) suggested that that her passing was a very real potential outcome.

Now, suddenly, everything is different.

As Nighean Bhan said about the passing of TB The Elder, it is more of a shock than a surprise - after all, the outcome of Alzheimer's is never in doubt.  And my mother is now herself, as I remember her, united now with her parents and sister and all of her Great-Aunts - and TB The Elder, of course.

In the few months leading up to their moving in 2020 and 2021, every night my mother would offer to rub my father's back on the couch.  It remained the one thing that she apparently felt able to do for my father after all the other things she had done over the years had slipped away with Alzheimer's.  And so, every night, she would sit on the couch and my father would lay down and she would rub his back.  Likely they did so the last night before they moved.

As awful as it sounds, it is a great relief.  My mother can finally get herself back. Her long journey of slowly losing herself is going and, as C.S. Lewis would probably say, she is more herself now than she ever was.  But all of a sudden, this year seems a lot less like a musical coda, where one returns to the previous bars of music to repeat, and more like a transition to an entirely different section of the music.