My niece has this funny anecdote on her blog side bar:
My mother, Sister David, was ill and in bed, and I was getting ready to leave to speak to the National Council of Catholic Women. Sister David had a bird in her room, a little parakeet, and I said to the bird, “So long, chico.” And he said, “Sock it to ’em, Angelica.”
“It’s the Lord,” I told David. She looked at me and said, “No, it’s Sister Regina. She taught him that.”
You know what the lesson there is? Careful what you attribute to the Lord. Sometimes it’s just a bird squawking.
– Mother Angelica
How very true, and a lesson that I should definitely keep in mind. I am always trying to figure out why things happened and looking for God’s presence in every situation.
That said, I have been trying to figure out some things about my mother’s death last month and some things have been really bothering me.
When we first sat down with hospice, the nurse told me that according to some study, most people die alone. In fact in the study she quoted to me, 86% of the people died alone. That may mean they had no family, but many times it meant that they waited until everyone was out of the room before they passed on. For some it was almost like, “Oh thank goodness, they’re gone! Now I can finally die!”
So I didn’t have any illusions that I would absolutely be there at my mom’s death, but I wanted to try to be if it was possible, keeping in mind that this was going to be a slow arduous process taking long days and not a matter of minutes.
The day of her death there was clearly a difference in her condition. I mentioned before it was like someone flicked a switch. She was vomiting a dark green substance that reminded me of cooked spinach and her bowels were continuously emptying themselves; her legs were turning blue and purple; her breathing had increased to almost a pant; her back and neck were arched and her mouth was open. But the most striking for me were her eyes. They were open but looked as if they had gray cataracts upon them. These eyes did not see motion, shape or form. I waved my arms in front of her and she did not respond at all. I spent the next few weeks thinking that she was suffering, starving for air and in great pain. For her body, this was probably true.
But Mr. Pete said something that made me start thinking differently. He thinks that perhaps mom’s soul had already left the body or was leaving the body and the body, without the soul, the body was in its purest, most animal -like form. The body was struggling to continue its normal processes as it had for 81 years, but without the soul it was without purpose. I thought about that a lot.
And then I wondered about all of the anecdotes I had heard about people who have died and then been resuscitated. What if my mother was looking down on us, seeing her body dying, seeing me at her bedside. And what if mom and maybe her guardian angel worked it out so that she would die alone, to protect my sister and me from the heartbreaking memory of seeing her body die this way.
There were things that happened in those last hours that would support this. My sister was leaving work to be with mom. But her computer kept freezing as she tried to shut it down, something that it had never donbe before. Then when she was on the way over to mom’s she accidentally took the wrong turn. My sister had been going to mom’s for weeks and weeks, and yet she made the wrong turn on this day? It’s curious.
On the other hand I was already beside my mother, but the thought came into my head that I should pick up Sam from his organ practice and go home. Thinking that I probably had time (in fact I thought this was going to be a long siege) I left. I picked up Sam and while I was home I decided to check my e-mail. One of our customers was asking for a UPS tracking number and I thought I would quickly check out the tracking of his item for him. But I must have typed that number in 20 different times and couldn’t get the tracking to work! That has never happened to me before that day or since. And while I was home I had the thought that I should have something to eat because it was probably going to be a long night and I might not have another chance to grab something. So I ate. And then on the way over in the car I remember thinking that I better grab a little gas so that I wouldn’t have any problems getting home late at night. And while I was having these thoughts, despite what I knew was happening with mom, I was calm and even peaceful. I thought I was being logical.
And as it worked out my sister arrived immediately after my mom died, and I arrived shortly after that.
Maybe it was all coincidence, or maybe it’s my own “bird squawking.” But part of me thinks that mom, who was a very private person in some ways, wouldn’t have wanted us to see her body dying and struggling like that. I don’t think that was a memory she would want us to have of her. So I want to believe that maybe via our guardian angels she kept us away from her final moments, knowing that we had had weeks and weeks with her and had already said our goodbyes and told her that we loved her. And the thought of mom doing that for us gives me a little peace about it.
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