Pilgrimage

My Mom died in March 2008. She was 64 years old. She died from "complications" of a very complex surgery she (we) chose to elect in an effort to prolong her life (there was a "troublesome" growth on her pancreas--not cancerous now, but likely to become cancerous later). My Mother was terrified of Pancreatic Cancer--she did not want to die a slow and painful death. The surgery was supposed to avoid that outcome--extend her life. Instead it killed her, and we were left behind stunned and in shock and completely unprepared. None of us had truly anticipated that outcome. We refused to consider the risks of surgery because we were all so focused on ridding her pancreas of that "troublesome" growth, we neglected to assess the other potential outcomes.

When I was still a small child, maybe 4 or 5 years old, my Mom reached over to answer the phone one day, and wrenched her back so badly that she slipped a disc. Living in a small town with sub-standard medical facilities, that slipped disc went undiagnosed for TEN YEARS. She was pretty much given prescriptions for Valium and told to "rest." I honestly have no memory of my mother being anything other than a Chronic Pain Sufferer. By the time her back problems were finally taken seriously by doctors, the slipped disc was 80% extended out of her spinal column, and she had been walking around like that, taking care of 2 active children, for TEN YEARS, causing permanent and chronic nerve damage. She had back surgery when I was in High School, but by then the cortisone shots and other "experimental" treatments for back pain had invited other complications, including a "frozen shoulder," loss of bone density and unstable vertebrae in her neck that also had to be fused surgically. And then, just when you thought things couldn't possibly get any worse, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis--a particularly severe case because medical ailments never seemed to strike her with anything but unusual complications.

Despite those challenges (or perhaps because of them), she was the Lioness in our household. She was never "just a Housewife" or "just a Mom." She was so much more than that. She was passionate and spirited and bold and courageous and gifted. She was the Heart and Soul and Voice of our Family.

But, basically, I grew up with a mother in a constant state of suffering. All things considered, she suffered well because she was stubborn and determined and incredibly, incredibly intelligent, talented, and devoted to her family. We were everything to her, and not in an icky-sweet co-dependent kind of way. She was fierce and strong and bold. She suffered in silence, stubbornly fighting doctors and pain. She refused to give in. She pushed us; inspired us; drove us; lectured us. She was both our harshest critic, and our staunchest supporter. She was NOT the "TV Sit-Com Mom." She was not a cheerful "Brady Bunch" Mom. There were dark days where harsh words were exchanged--words that were burned into my memory, and then buried deep. There were days when I "just knew" I needed to "be especially good." There was one Christmas (but only one Christmas) before she FINALLY got her back surgery--when I had to decorate the tree all by myself (and that's a BIG DEAL because my Mom was HUGE on the whole Christmas thing). There were times when I was stunned and shocked by her support of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and abortion. But, she was also much more intimately acquainted with true suffering than I was...

When we cleaned out her closet and bathroom cabinets after her death, we found numerous prescription bottles, mostly full, of powerful painkillers--valium, vicodin, demarol, oxy contin--prescriptions she tried NOT to take. They made her mind "fuzzy," and that was just something she could not tolerate. For all of her talk about "Quality of Life" and the "Right to Choose," she had enough prescription pills to overdose a football team at her disposal.

She wanted to live.

When she was in the hospital, she suffered a seizure, and they had to do an emergency tracheotomy, leaving her hooked up to a respirator. She couldn't talk, and that was a torturous complication for her. Pain, or no pain, communication was her greatest strength. We tried giving her a notepad and pen to write things down, but the pain medication affected her fine motor skills, so we couldn't read her handwriting. I brought a whiteboard from my daughter's room, which, ironically, was a Christmas present to her from her Grandma, and some Whiteboard markers. She could write messages to us on the Whiteboard more easily.

The last message she wrote--to my Dad, who was with her, as she struggled to breathe because her lungs were filling with fluid, and her internal organs were beginning to hemorrhage, and she knew recovery was unlikely: "I would do it for you..."

She was begging him to "Pull the Plug"--end her suffering. (Which, of course he could not and would not do...)

She left behind not only us (husband, daughters, grandchildren), but also a house full of unfinished projects and unfulfilled plans.

Five unfinished quilts sat in her sewing room. Three of them only needed to have the binding sewn on. I finished those in time for her Memorial Service, so we could display those quilts during the service. Her best friend--despite being very ill and fighting her own battle against ovarian cancer--finished a quilt for my nephew that was similar to the one she made for my son, her first grandchild. She appliqued letters cut out of fabric onto the back of the quilt that spelled out, "To Nicholas with Love from Nana." I'm still working on the fifth quilt--a quilt all in white, with an intricate, hand-quilted "Tree of Life" design, also for my nephew because she made one for my first baby just like it.

I received a message recently on my Facebook account from a woman I am related to only by marriage--her husband's mother is my grandmother's aunt. I came to know her through genealogy research--a hobby that my mother introduced me to. There is an entire shelf in the "office" of my parent's house that holds books on genealogy. One of her wishes was to travel to Pennsylvania and Ohio and seek out the locations of the old "Family Homesteads" and cemeteries. She talked about this often, but knew it was impossible. Her medical conditions made travel over long distances impossible.

We had my Mother cremated, and my father, my sister, and I all have urns with her ashes. I carried my little urn in my purse when I traveled last year. I went to Washington, D.C. and Springfield, IL. I scattered her ashes near the Lincoln Memorial and Lincoln's home in Springfield (he was her favorite President). I also journeyed to Seattle, WA--where my sister and I were born. My father, my sister, and I all agreed that the time where Mom was probably the happiest was when she lived in Seattle--where she was a young wife with beautiful babies and her whole life ahead of her. Healthy, strong, and pain-free. Some of her ashes were scattered along Alkai Beach and within Seattle's Arboretum.

But I also realize that wherever I get to go--places like Washington, D.C., Yellowstone, Springfield, IL, etc.--those will all be places that my Mom would have loved to visit, too. If she were still here, she would have expected me to come home and "tell her all about it."

Instead, my Pilgrimage is to visit all those places my Mom would have wanted to go, and leave some of her ashes.

It would be so much better for me to come home and "tell her all about it," but instead, my pilgrimage is to GO, take her with me, and get to live out the life she would have wanted me to have.