The Other Plug

I am holding the phone to my ear, and my son is on my hip. He is only a few months old, and weighing enough to start toning my arm muscles. But from this phone call, amongst the blur of news, I but only feel the thumping in my heart, no longer is the voice audible on the other end. It’s as if time stood still, in my little part of the world. I was trembling, and things were coming and going in and out of focus for me. All I could think was, she won’t even make it to when he goes to kindergarten. Then reality snapped back, and I could hear the positive upbeat tale being told to me, that 4 years is a good amount of time to get things into perspective and finished. My mother was diagnosed with interstitial pneumonitis when I was 26 ½ years old. Dammit. Stop this from happening. No. No. No. I didn’t have words, they just wouldn’t come out. The voice on the other end was my brother’s but all I could manage to say was, “ok, ok, ok.” Like he was telling me the weather for next week, or any random thing.

I felt it then and forever since have felt it over and over again and again in my chest, a sharp rake, slamming down onto my sternum, breaking open the rib cage and callously ripping at the muscle of my very heart. Raw, gaping and opened up to hideous foul hatred towards an illness that would soon tear my family apart. No one knew how to comfort one another, so nothing was said beyond that. Not until the last year. My dear mother managed to stay alive for 8 years after that dreaded phone call.

It's sad, but not one of us siblings knew how to comfort one another, so nothing was said beyond, “It totally sucks, huh?” I can’t say any of us cried together, but I can say that I did cry with my mother about it. My siblings became more accepting of showing emotions to one another around the last couple of years of her life. Sometimes we did the crying together behind my mother’s back, and even crying and sniffling as a family with mom and dad, but it was rare, very rare… never as a whole unified family did we do this. Usually you’d just see someone get up and leave the room to be by themselves for a moment. It was important to hide this raw emotion of sadness in our family. It was the elephant in the room and it was ignored. At times I tried to address it head on, that ugly elephant, but usually my parents somehow averted the conversation or distracted me with other comments.

I learned to mourn by myself. When I’d go out to visit during the summers, trips to the beach summoned many tears for myself and for my siblings’ loss as well. There is something about listening to the roar of the ocean on the perch of my sand dune. I sit feeling lonely in my sorrow, hugging my knees, sitting there watching the lulls of each wave coming in as far as it possibly can, then slowly give way and go back out. I breathe in the crisp salty air. This is one of my places. There is something in the majestic power of Mother Earths’ oceans and tides, that can bring one to inner melancholy or peace, amongst our inner strife’s. During her slow miserable death, I’d find myself her, at Ocean Ave Beach, in Carmel and feel the prick of tears in the back of my eyes begging to be let out.

Sometimes I’d let them slide down my cheeks, other times in anger I’d force them at bay. I’d feel so angry at God for the whole ordeal, taking my mother so early, where she wouldn’t see my kids grow up. They wouldn’t get to feel her arms embrace them as she did so freely back in the day, do they remember her hugs? Her art projects and long walks, looking for wild turkeys and their feathers? Barely. The youngest doesn’t remember her at all, just from the pictures.

How I would curse God for taking her home early, early in my world that is. I hated Him, God. You could say I was pretty mad at him and his selfishness in taking one of my best friends, my mother and confidant away. I hurt when I allowed the anger to be at bay, But the anger would creep back up, and turn to tears. It was so much easier to be angry at God, then to feel anything that resembled core feelings, like hurt or sorrow. At home, I had to be strong, but grief would find me, its’ weight lumped in the back of my throat. I’d find myself wiping hot angry tears away, when doing the dishes or doing an art project with the kids. My small uncomprehending children would perplexedly ask, “Why you cry Mama?” My response would be, “I’m just sad because of grandma, that she is sick”.

I remember that I almost envied my older sisters’ kids for they were older and would remember their grandmother, my mom, but not my kids. I hated it, that my children wouldn’t remember her like I wanted them to. I was so selfish back then, grieving and introverted into myself. I now see some of the lessons I was to learn from her death itself and the aftermath. I will talk more about that later on in a different chapter.

As I was saying, the beach is cathartic for me, because I have so many memories of mom taking us to the beach for the whole day to play and dip our skinny little bodies in the tepid waters of Central California. Boogie boarding, body surfing and skim boarding were our favorites, but mostly just digging up the sand and either burying one another or making magical and mysterious sand castles with seaweed here and a stick poking out there to suggest a door or person of the like. Getting sandwiches and what not out of a cooler, her reading in her chair that she brought as we played. She didn’t necessarily play with us, but was there watching and just there for us when we had things to bring back from the sea, like a rook or cool shell, for her to “ewe and aaaah” at. Sometimes she’d arrange to meet another family or two so she could talk and gossip with her friends while we all played, but mostly it was just us as a family.

I remember specifically one day towards the end of her life, driving in her white Honda van. I was driving, we were stopped at a light. My mother in sudden frustration, slammed her fist on the side arm of the chair. Knowing full well she must’ve wanted to say “Dammit”, but my mother was not the swearing type. She said to my sisters and I who were in the car with her, almost sardonically, half laughing, with a grimace on her face, and stated, “Will you all please learn what it is that you are to learn from me, so I can just die? This is so darn tiring… please learn what it is, so I can rest.” The car went silent for a moment, “One of us says, “I’m so sorry you have to go through this”. My mother is shaking her head, I look over from the drivers’ seat and murmur in utter despair, “mom, I’m trying”. I don’t think I learned what I was supposed to learn from my mother that day. I do know she learned patience and endurance. This was something my mother managed to win first place in.

She taught me, so much. It was very hard to watch her try to dress in the mornings, especially on Sundays, when she’d get ready for church. She didn’t’ have to go to church, but church she went. It was her statement to others, “that I can still do this”. I remember with tears pooling at the backs of my eyes, daring me with vulnerability, to leak, as I watched my mother pull her nylons on, one by one, I kept lifting my hand up and toward her to help, but she would patiently say, “I need to stay strong, and if I let you do it, I won’t be able to stay strong.”

“Oh Mother”, I thought, “you are so strong!” For her to just keep going, enduring the slow and exhausting suffocation. Her labored breath, was agonizing to listen to. But the desperate selfishness in me prayed they’d keep coming, in those last years of life. She drew a very clear picture for me when she stated more than once, “that it’s as if sucking on a coffee straw with an elephant sitting right on her chest”.

I will not ever forget the moments leading to her departure from this world.

The night before she died, she told us it was time for her to go, that she couldn’t do it anymore, and that she wanted us to pull the plug of oxygen supplied to her. She did not want to be resuscitated. She wanted morphine like nobody’s business, and to die peacefully with us around her. She was done with this phase of her soul’s life, and wanted just go on to the next phase.

I remember her looking at me, over at the end of the hospital bed where I was sitting and writing everything she said down. That’s the unknown writer in me, note taking. She looked upon me as if I were 10 years old, and said, “Oh Janey, you do understand what is happening tomorrow morning, right?” I barely was able to do the head gesture of nodding as I whispered loud enough for her to hear, “Yes, mom, I know you’re going to die tomorrow, you want to die tomorrow.” She exclaimed back at me, “Are you okay with this?” “Yes, mom, I want you to rest, to be happy and at peace again. I hate seeing you suffer so much.” My older sister was in the room, and just looked at me like I had said the “F” word. But I wasn’t ten anymore, I had just turned 35. I wanted my mother to know I understood. At this time in her life, she was in and out of reality due to the effects of the different drugs she was taking to ease her pain and difficulty in breathing. She basically suffocated to death over a very long period of time.

The end was the worst bittersweet thing I ever have experienced in my life. I sat there, that morning of August 12,2006. Holding lher hand, hearing the moans and sniffles of loved ones nearby. Why was I holding her hand? I hardly held her hand, but never the matter, I was holding a frail piece of paper of what resembled a hand. It wasn’t cold nor warm, it just was. I bowed my head, and prayed to God to let her go, let her soul leave in peace. There were times where we thought she may have slipped to the other side, then she’d open her eyes real wide, and say, “oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what have I done?” I remember my brother and sister and I all at once, saying, you’re still alive mom, it’s okay to let go, you can go.

I looked over at my dad in agony, and could see the emotion of fear in his face. He didn’t want to pull the plugs. He stood as if he was a solid stone statue, not daring to move, or it would break the spell of her existing and being alive. There was peace in the room, I do remember feeling that. I remember looking around the room, it was bland, a typical hospital room, small with a chair or two in it. A curtain rod attached to the ceiling for privacy, if needed and the color they used on the walls was the color of death for me.

There was grave sadness but understanding amongst us all. All of us were there to say good bye. We wanted her to be free and at rest and to go back home, to her soul family. It was so very quiet. Last words were murmured and wailed painfully both loudly and in soft tones. It was amazing how lucid she seemed for most of it. You could tell when the morphine kicked in. For she would look at as all, quizzically, “am I dead yet?” We as a family, all circled around her, “No mom, you’re still here.”

She’d close her eyes, then struggle with her will, to get her chest to barely rise with what we took for granted, a simple breath. The minutes mercifully to those clinging for her life, dragged on. We were exhausted with torment, and it was time to let her go. She was finished. Too spent both physically and emotionally. She was so damn tired. And tortured every minute of every breath she took.

I felt close to her spirit. I could feel her smiling at me, although she was laying there so fragile and dead like. Her spirit was ready. At this time, I felt so much love, that only a daughter could feel for her own frail dying mother. It was a sacred moment that I will never forget.

In a moment, I would feel my heart tearing, gasping and tortured beyond my minds’ comprehension. I stood up, looked my dad in the eye and went for the first plug, and without hesitating, I pulled it. I felt her in between lives. And I couldn’t stand seeing her suffer and try to breathe any longer. Maybe it was selfish, but at the time I thought I was doing my mother a favor, helping her end her life. My father broke out of his trance and followed suit with me, and with shaking shoulders kissing her on the head saying how much he loved her, he pulled the other plug.

Calm. Disbelief. Silence.

I will never forget hearing my older sister say after I had said a few times, “go to the white light mom, let go and go towards the white light if you see it.” My sister told me that she felt my mothers’ father above the bed (for my mother and he were very close). My older sister Shery, said, “Do you see Grandpa, Mom? Go to him.” All of a sudden it was happening. I could feel death in the room. I felt and watched my mother take her last breath. I felt this cool cape lift past me, as if I caught the wind of a miracle. I could feel this coolness go through me. I feel it was her soul.

We all just sat there, in our own thoughts and mourning. No one knowing what quite to say, I remember the PA calling some time of death, not a doctor. It was mid-morning some time. It didn’t matter to me, what mattered was the hole in my chest, she took a piece of me with her. I’ve since then always felt a void, and emptiness and longing. The ache is literally an ache. Oh, to see her again. To hear her laughter or hear her soft words of advice. She was a woman who when talked, we listened too because she didn’t say a lot of nonsense. She was wise beyond her 59 years. I guess living like you could die every day, does that to you.