The Last Peony

In which we become the wind.

If you are just joining, please know there is a part one to this saga called The Long Goodbye, in case you need to catch up.

The Long Goodbye

It was a stupid Monday morning in June of 2023 when I realized I had not received a Tweet Tweet text. Not long after she started hospice, and began taking a varied cocktail of fridge drugs, I had my mom send me a proof of life text each morning. She chose to send “Tweet Tweet I’m still here!!” more often than not.

I had spent a long afternoon with her the Friday before, where she told me some great stories about her memories of sleeping with her sisters and her Oma in the refugee camp in Germany, how her father was a whiz at black market smuggling with eggs hidden under the floorboards. Her head pain was bumming her out, and the hospice team was sending her new drugs. I sent this text to my kids, as she is their Oma.

Saturday I had work and an event all day, on Sunday the boys came over for some grilling and we did the most ridiculous thing of starting to dig up my yard to do a patio. That’s denial with a goddamned shovel, is what that is. I had called her earlier, while grilling, and she texted back saying that she was going to bed early, hadn’t slept well the night before, and would see me on Monday if I wanted to swing by for her wheelbarrow.

When I texted that Monday morning, I thought she must have walloped herself with that new drug and was just sleeping it off. I had a video shoot that kept me busy in the morning, but I knew that I was headed out to her house straight after when the second text and first phone call went unanswered.

I found myself driving out with the same feelings I had in January, but sadly more prepared. I stopped off at Lunds to get some supermarket sushi, because that’s about the only thing she’d been eating. I knew that was a diversion for myself, a tentative fiction.

When I got to the house, again it was evident that she had not woken up yet, lights were off, curtains pulled, thank goodness we had agreed to remove The Murder Stick from the kitchen door for just this scenario. I walked in and stood in the kitchen for a full five minutes before I scrapped the courage to lightly call out “mom?” daring her to still be alive.

No response. Then lounder, MOM?? As I walked back down her hallway, I heard it. HUH? she said. Relief! Tweet Tweet still here!

She was in the TV room laying on the daybed. She swung her legs around to sit up, and I realized that she had been there all night. I assumed the methadone had caught her off guard and given her a Wisconsin-grade hangover.

She was rubbing her face, groggy, and said she’d had a fever last night, slept on the daybed. I was kneeling in front of her.

“Crap, let’s take your temperature.”

“I need the flergezink”

The what now? “Is that the name of the drug,” I asked.

“The flergezink, flerg.” She mumbled. I handed her the thermometer and told her to stick it in her mouth so we could check her temp. Instead, she passed it back and forth between her hands.

“Mom, stick it in your mouth!” I laughed, come on lady.

Instead she said, “I have to go to the bathroom” so I guided her to it, wobbly as she was. On our way back to the daybed she said some more things I couldn’t quite make out, and then she laid down and went right to sleep. I immediately called our Amber Hospice Nurse.

Amber was on the other side of the metro, and decided to send another person from the care team who was in the area, Svetlana (we do love a Russian nurse, do we not?) When she showed up, we woke my mom up to take her temp, she was at 102. She was confused by Svetlana, and was saying things I could not understand. I still thought there had been something wrong with the methadone.

Then I heard Svetlana on the phone calling it in, and I heard the word: stroke.

I hit me like a roundhouse kick to the gut. If she had a stroke, she wouldn’t be able to talk to me. To tell me what she wanted, what she needed. It was her worst fear, losing her mind, losing her ability to communicate. I knew she didn’t want this, and I didn’t want it for her. Svetlana told me to just keep giving her aspirin to keep the fever down, and morphine to keep her comfortable. She told me that Amber would call me in a bit, and left.

Dear reader, there is a thing I can’t tell you about a promise I made to my mother once. But this promise was welded to my very bones which suddenly felt so heavy.

She got up one more time to go to the bathroom, but just sat down on the closed toilet and rubbed her face. She kept trying to say things to me, and I told her I couldn’t understand. She saw her disheveled reflection in the mirror and said, clearly: Dear Gawd, as she ran a hand through her hair.

I was walking her down the hallway, trying to get her into her room, when we passed the office and she leaned into the doorway. I tied to pull her back, thinking she was confused, but she leaned in harder. There were six garbage bags full of old shoes and clothes lined up against the wall. She had been death nesting and clearing out things for charity pickup. She pointed to the black bags and said:

“These need to go out” Clear as day.

“Yeah mom, I promise I will get them out.”

“No, these need to go out.” She knew my procrastination levels better than anyone.

Those were the last words my mother ever said to me. Fitting.

I got her into her actual bed, covered her up and made sure she had water near her. I gave her some meds, she took them, and then I sat on the edge of the bed.

She looked at me sitting there, and then grabbed my hand. She held it to her heart, hugging my arm and giving me a look of mirth and love, smiling from her deepest self. And then she threw my arm away dramatically and raised her eyebrows.

I was not to sit and watch over her “like some god-awful Victorian thing.” Without words, her monumental brain, which was probably suffocating inside her head, managed to communicate that. Without words, she was still herself. At her weakest, she was still my mom, calling the shots.

That was our last conscious moment together.

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What followed was probably the worst night of my life.

She slipped into sleep, and I talked to Amber who told me the med cocktail I was to give her on the hour. Just a little squirt of liquid morphine into her mouth, she didn’t even have to swallow, it would absorb into her mouth.

But because I didn’t know then that we’d had our last moments, I was still thinking that I had to just get her through this night until Amber could come in the morning and help me figure this out. So German.

I still thought we were in it. I ordered yoga pants off of Amazon to be delivered to the house because I thought I was going to have to be there for a few days while we “dealt” with this. I told Amber this is her worst fear, that she can’t talk to me. We can’t go through a week of this, it will kill her. (I know.) The poor woman, in her sweetest way, said that things at this stage usually progress pretty quickly, in her experience, and I STILL didn’t really get it.

My son Joey and daughter Megan came out to bring me my toothbrush, my phone charger and a few things. We sat and chatted in the living room, started the tears that would flow for weeks, and by the time they left it was 10pm.

In her bed, my mom was sleeping, but fitfully. She was throwing off her covers so I would bring a cool washcloth and adjust her fan, and leave again.

By 12am, she started making mumbling sounds. I was in the kitchen, typing away on a story I was working on so that I could file it and be ready to help her with anything when she woke up in the morning. I believed she was having a fever druggie dream of some sort, that’s what it sounded like.

By 1am, the sounds were different. If you want me to say death rattle, I won’t. It wasn’t a rattle, which I would expect to be some cavernous clacking sound from deep in the body. This was like vocal panting. Her breathing was so fast, and it was almost like a loud whimper. It made me think that I was hurting her. I was doing this wrong.

By 2am I couldn’t keep her covered, and she kept tossing and sliding down the bed. I felt utterly helpless. I wanted to get out of the room as soon as I gave her the liquid. I was beginning to panic. I called the hospice 24-hour hotline and asked them if I was doing this wrong, if I was making it worse, if I was killing her. They told me that I was doing great, that her body was doing what bodies do, it was shutting down. They said, keep giving her the med on the hour.

By 3am I was exhausted. I felt like I had paper hands that could barely pull the med into the dropper. She was panting louder now and my mind could read it as nothing but pain. Even though it wasn’t. I wiped her lips, which was dry from the rapid breathing. Then I set an alarm for 4am, put a pillow over my head and tried to sleep on the couch in the living room.

By 4am I was numb. I gave her the dose, refreshed her washcloth, put a little lip balm on her lips and walked out into the living room. I stood there for one hour in the same spot, looking at nothing. I literally could not move.

By 5am I called the hotline again. I was sure that something was wrong and this time I was angry with the nurse that answered. I went into the garage and I was shitty and said that clearly they aren’t hearing what I’m saying! It was her, this sweet person who I had just yelled at, who signs up to spend her life helping people who help people die, her who told me: your mom is just dying, what’s happening is very natural.

And it was like a light went on.

Oh yeah. This is it. Ok.

It was 6am, and I went into her room with the meds. She was quieter, I propped up her pillows a bit and took the washcloth off her head. She was breathing peacefully and I laid a hand on her forehead which was still warm, but not feverish as it had been.

I walked back to the living room and noticed the sun was coming up. I looked out the window and saw a flash of pink in the back yard. Walking barefoot through the grass to snip the last peony in her garden, I found my acceptance. Among the flowing folds of petals in the peony I realized the difference between thinking, and knowing.

I set the flower on her white wicker nightstand, told her I loved her, and left the room. But halfway down the hall, something made me turn back, and go back to touch her her forehead. She was gone.

As the sun rose on the morning of June 13th, she left to become the wind.

And with this telling, I complete the pact to share knowledge and be unafraid of death, which puts living into practice and gives love its softest parts.

xosm