My Mother, Me and Depression

(Author's Note:  My mother died in the late afternoon on May 9, 2011, after years of decline and a short illness.  The absence from this blog since the last entries in June, 2011, is entirely due to my reaction to her passing.  I am slowing gaining an emotional balance sufficient for me to move forward.  Still, the closeness of our relationship and of my intimate care-giving in her last months placed burdens in me I had not anticipated.  I knew the greiving process would be difficult, but I had no idea how hard had turned out to be for me.  With this new post I am starting anew and I am hopeful I can regularly report my thinking to all who wish to read it.  Thank you.)

“Hey, we’ve moving to North Texas”, my wife, Karen, exclaimed. 

“Well,” I replied, “I can be depressed anywhere, and North Texas is as good as any to be depressed.”

And it was true:  I was as depressed in our little city of Denton as I was when we lived in Brooklyn and in the lovely hamlet of Ashley Falls, MA, from which we were removed to Denton.

But you know, these places have nothing on being in the house, being in the bedroom, where my mother died, where I, with help, rolled her over from side to side to clean and to dress her, to make and remake her bed and to try to comfort her to her last breaths.

My father died in a hospital and my mother got a call from there letting us know of the event.  That is bad, but I still had my mother.  And yes, I still have my wife and our son, but that’s different.

I’ve wondered over the years if my mother went before my father if the father-son bond would be as tight and as deeply seated as  mother-son, after all while I am definitely a product of my father, but it is from the mother we humans are born, are borne.

Anyway, I’ve stuffed down the loss, repressing most conscious thinking, but at times the hurt hits releasing sad remembrances.  Of late I am becoming ever-more teary-eyed as I lay in her room, on my bed, on the same side of the bed as she, staring up in the same visual aspect of the ceiling as she, trying to fall asleep quickly, but failing.  And in failing I am remembering her last days, her last moments:

I see her lying in the bed in the hospital, we knowing her health is weakening, and she still self-aware, not yet engulfed in dementia, full of hope she will be going home the next day to recover and to live to see beyond her 95^th birthday.  The hospital care team understands she is in her last days and makes arrangements for Hospice services.  The physician Director of the in-patient Hospice sees my mother letting her know who he is, his responsibilities in the hospital and the plans being arranged for my mother.  My mother, a nurse of long standing, understands the meaning of all this and it puts her into a deep, deep depression from which, I believe, she did not recover, and which, while she fought it, it hasten the end.  She was not yet ready to die!  We were not ready to let her go!

I see our pastor praying over my mother.  Karen had called the rectory early in the morning as see could see my mother could not last much longer.  By now her dementia was full.  She had stopped eating for nearly three weeks, stopped taking water for a week.  The Monsignor read from his book, he and I prayed together.  Then he said, “Lord, I commend the soul of our Frances to your care”.  As soon as he finished “care”, my mother began her dying breaths.  Hospice lets folks know the stages of dying and the very last is what they describe as breathing like a fish out of water.  I’d seen this before several times and I knew what it looked like and what it meant.  The breathing slowly shallowed, retaining the fish out of water rhythm…a wispy inhale, a wispy exhale…a nearly invisible inhale, an equally invisible exhale, then nothing, her face whitened, her partially opened eyes starring but not seeing…

I was alone with my mother when she died, although Karen had just parked the car arriving from work and my son had gone out to meet to let her know what was happening. 

It seems to me the Western way of dying is with others:  Dying should never be undertaken by oneself.  I suspect that is one of the reasons suicide is such a trouble to our society as the act by its very nature is alone.  The “ideal” death is with family and friends.  So, at least with my mother she had me.  But, you know, witnessing her last moments by myself has placed a psychic burden in me I had not anticipated.  My Karen can empathize and comfort which she does, but the second to second moments of the experience of the death can never be shared in the same way when others are not present to see them.  And here, I think, is the genius of the Western Ideal, in that the living, who must move on with their individual lives, can deeply share a comfort from feeling the presence of others at the moments of death, something of which a lonely son cannot partake.