When My Mother Died

The last several months of my mother's life were spent in pain. Her nerves were dying in her arms and legs. The pain was constant and enduring, and could not be eased with pills. Pain relievers work by deadeding the nerves, but her pain was already caused by the actual dying of nerves. Doctors suggested that they could solve some of this by cutting off her extremeties. She made it clear to the family that if it came to that, she did not want peices of herself chopped off just to prolong her suffering. We, as a family, accepted that.

For some time before my mother's death, I was living in her house. After she made her final return to the hospital, I took to sleeping in the main bedroom. It was warmer in there; nights in November could be very cold in the Sierra Nevada

I remember one night that I wasn't able to sleep all night. There was a dog next door who barked constantly, literally, all night! "Woof-woof-woof . . . woof-woof-woof . . ." Three barks, then a pause as he took a breath, and three more barks, repeated, all night long. That dog had a lot of resilience. It was a bitterly cold night, I remember. I couldn't get warm enough to sleep, and that damn dog made sure I didn't even doze. I hated that dog. I cursed that dog. I considered taking a bucket of water out to douse on him. That would shut him up!

After a few weeks in the hospital, my mother slipped into a coma. The day before her death my sister and I stood beside our mother's bed in the ICU, with a doctor. She had been in a coma for several days. We were very sad, of course, and could do little more than stand there silently, not knowing what to do or say. The doctor suggested that one thing they could do was to amputate her leg. When he said that, I noticed that Mom moved her big toe.

Here was a woman in a coma, supposedly unconscious of everything going on around her, unable to move anything except to breathe. And she had moved her toe in response to the doctor's suggestion! And this is my regret: I didn't say, "No, we won't do that; we will respect her wishes." I didn't say anything at all.

I did not comfort my mother by letting her know, on her death bed, that we heard her, and cared for her feelings.

I have always relied on others to say the right thing, the comforting thing, in difficult moments. It requires getting out of your own shell of pain to offer strength you don't feel to others in as much pain as you. It is hard.

The dog who barked in the night? I learned later that the neighbors were a particularly paranoid pair. They had tied him up outside, never to go inside. They put a bright light on a pole, and kept it turned on all the time, night and day. It was a very bright light, illuminating a full acre to near daylight intensity. The dog was tied to a stake at the base of this light, never getting the comfort of darkness, or a den to lie down to sleep in. This was his life for weeks by the time of that bitterly cold night when he barked. He was undoubtedly psychotic from lack of sleep, deprivation of his freedom, and his separation from his "pack". All he wanted was for someone to come out and be with him in his pain.

Some time after, a woman ran up to my door. She was extremely distraught. She had just hit a dog with her car. It was lying in the road and she didn't know what to do. I rushed out and brought the dog back to the yard. He was severely injured, but conscious. I squatted on the ground, petted him, spoke his name, told him he was a good dog, and watched him as he died.