Two Years Ago Today....

.....my mom passed away.

The past few months have been pretty hard on me, and I've been thinking about my mom a lot. I've been missing her a lot. A friend of mine recently wrote about her loss on her blog, and she said it was therapeutic to her. Maybe writing about this will be therapeutic to me.

Two years ago and an evening ago, I got a phone call. It was my sister, who was visiting my mom from out of state. I knew it was her, because she usually always calls me when she's visiting my mom. " I knew it was you", I jokingly said. That's when all the jokes stopped. She called to tell me that they had taken mom away in an ambulance.

About a half hour later I got a call from my other sister who had gone in the ambulance with my mom. "There's bleeding in the brain", she said. When she said those words, I knew. I knew there was no hope. My mom had had a massive bleeding stroke.

I frantically packed my clothes and my girls' clothes. My husband was frantically running around after me too. See, he had to go to work on Monday, and when you're in the military, you don't miss work, especially when it's a day as important as that day was. What was he going to do? He knew he needed and wanted to go up with me, but how? We finally decided to take two cars.

My aunt called. She didn't want me driving up there by myself in that state of mind. I told her not to worry. Husband was going to follow me from behind and I KNEW that my grandma, up in heaven, would be watching over me to make sure I got there to see my mom before she passed on to say goodbye.

When I got up there, I met my youngest sister in the hospital, and husband took the kids to my mom's house. I saw my mom hooked up to machines. She was not responsive. She didn't open her eyes. She didn't talk. She just lied there. They moved her up to ICU shortly after I got there. The doctors kept coming in to talk to us. They would run additional tests in the morning to confirm what we already knew. There was too much bleeding in the brain and it had shifted her brain. They said her eyes were fixed and dialated. If we took her off the machines, did she want her organs donated? I had no idea. I was in a fog, yet very real state.

My youngest sister and I stayed there. We were NOT leaving our mom. My other sister couldn't handle it. She kept coming and going.

At some point in the night, while my sister and I dozed for a few minutes, I could actually feel my mom's soul leave the room. When I woke up and looked at her, I knew for sure. Her soul was gone. She was up in heaven. All that was left was her body, still hooked up to machines.

In the morning, the doctors were going to start running more tests but we said no. We knew. We knew she was gone. We made the decision to turn off the machines. It wasn't a hard decision though. Mom had always told us that she never wanted to be hooked up to machines. She didn't want to suffer. She always joked that she wanted us to take her out back and shoot her. (It may sound shocking but not the way she said it).

So we made the calls to everyone. We got my sister back down to the hospital to say goodbye. She left again before they shut off the machines. No one knew if she wanted to have her organs donated and while it is a WONDERFUL thing to do, we were selfish at the time. We wanted it to be over with. We didn't want to think of our mom still being hooked up to machines to have her organs harvested, for another 14 hours. We wanted to be there when her body stopped.

My husband came by on his way back down to our house so he could go to work the next day and get time off to come back up. They were getting ready to turn the machines off. My sister's boyfriend had come down too. Both of them stayed in the room with us the whole time.

Both my sister and I watched my mom, each of us were on one side of her. We agonizingly memorized every inch of her. We touched her face. We hugged her. We kissed her. We looked at her feet and hands and looked at our own to see what we inherited from her.

We waited for her heart to stop. For her body to stop. When it finally did, we hugged her and said goodbye. We hugged each other and cried. We both knew that we would be there for each other.

As sad and devastating as that moment was, I would NOT trade it for anything. I was there when my mom took her last breath. I was there until the end. It was a moment in time that I will always cherish, and I know my sister will too. My mom was there when we came in the world and we were there when she left.