Embracing Love and Farewell.

In our last journey together, as Sandra, my mother laid on her deathbed. I held her hand, it was more than a farewell grip; it was a silent promise to keep her spirit alive because I saw her and loved her.

At the beginning of this journey, there was plenty of frustration and deep-seated resentment felt towards my mother. Stemming from the profound absence of nurturing and emotional neglect in my upbringing. A painful reality that has shaped my emotional landscape in complex ways. I know, tale as old as time. Like any artist seeking to add meaning to the pain of our existence, I found it honorable to witness my mother’s last days on this earth. I could taste the proverbial lemonade resulting from this experience even though it wasn’t very clear in the moment.

My mother was a woman who endured lots of emotional and physical pain. She was severely neglected as a child and as a result, an absent minded mother. She started relying on me to listen to her problems since I was a kid, to include how she tried to abort me more than once. The intention behind this story was to paint the picture of how special I was for surviving her attempts. She was emotionally harmful and misguided. But this is not a story about how bad she was, I made peace with that and I deeply thank her for the effort she did put into bettering my life. My mother was good at pushing others to do better but not herself.

Her well being started declining rapidly after my father divorced her. She never recovered from the emotional pain of feeling abandoned and she started getting sick. She spent most of her money irresponsibly and didn’t show any care for how she was going to survive, she just expected her children to take care of her and I was her top choice. She had been grooming me since I was a child to be hyper responsible and step up for her.

The guilt and obligation I felt was insufferable and she wanted it that way so she didn’t have to put effort into helping herself. After she lost everything she had, she moved in with my brother for about a year. After that, I offered her to live with my husband and I since we had an extra bedroom. I was terrified because I could feel she would weight heavy on me like she always had. Somehow I felt I had to do the right thing because I also wanted to help my brother out who didn’t have the space to have her in his home.

The experience of such perceived guilt to take full responsibility for my mother was akin to carrying a shadow that darkened even my brightest moments, except for one; being pregnant. The enabling had to stop, putting me at a choice point. I started gathering the family where I exposed the situation and allowed others to step up for her too and lighted my load. It worked out for a while, she lived with me and didn’t ask me for much else because that was my boundary. Keeping up with everything else she needed was no longer my duty. I was growing a human and also healing my own emotional pain preparing for motherhood.

She faced a double lung transplant while I was six months pregnant and I believe the anticipation of meeting my son gave her strength to survive it. She lived about four more years enduring all kids of medical procedures due to her body rejecting the lungs among other diagnosis. During these years I went through a divorce myself. When my son was only two months old, I had to face being a single mother and selling my home. She went to stay with my brother again after my house sold and I could focus on rebuilding myself from my own crippling feelings of abandonment. It was my turn to show her and others how to not only survive divorce but also seek ways to thrive. I am very grateful for the lessons I learned from witnessing my mother’s life story. She was my biggest cautionary tale.

By the time she had overstayed her welcome at my brother’s house, I felt healed enough to be there for her again. I rented a house for us three, my son Jack, my mom and I. Very quickly I realized that the pain regarding my mother had gone nowhere, I was just too distracted to look into it. I really wanted to believe it would be different this time. However, once again my mother didn’t seem to mind letting herself go in front of my eyes regardless of my attempts to empower her. This time she had irreversibly burned all her bridges, I was all she had and I had a major internal conflict.

On one side, there's the allure of immediate satisfaction by putting myself first. I wanted to completely leave her to the consequences of her choices for not demanding more of herself and mindlessly outsourcing the responsibility of her life to me. I was angry and it was tempting to look the other way and ignore that she needed rescuing. After all, we’re in the self-love era and one could easily misconstrue this concept to fit our own selfish narratives. It is now somewhat socially acceptable to ignore the other.

On the other side of this internal battle is the voice of reason, advocating for what is best in the long run. The realm of careful thought, planning, and consideration of consequences. This side tormented me about future outcomes, responsibilities, and the broader impact of my choices. The harder path often requires discipline, sacrifice, and sometimes, foregoing immediate pleasures or desires for the sake of a greater good or a more meaningful achievement.

Navigating this internal struggle felt like a balancing act. Emotions and desires pulling me one way, while logic and responsibility pulling me another. It was a dance of competing priorities and values, where the right choice was not easy but it was somewhat clear. I saw the consequences of being passive in love, of not demanding more of ourselves for the sake of the ones we choose to love. What is it all for anyway if we’re alone?

The last year of her life, I decided to do what I could to keep her happy without hurting myself too much in the process, I knew the end was near and I didn’t want to ignore all the ways in which she improved my life directly or indirectly. How could she had done better? in her world, she was a wilted flower in a forgotten garden. I couldn’t help but notice that if only she had overcome herself this would have been a much different story. There was the nugget of wisdom I needed to do the right thing. This empathy fueled my resolve to be her support system.

I overcame myself by virtue of always bestowing that piece of advice to many others, I’d hate to be a hypocrite. With ups and downs I surrendered to her fate, the one she chose by not choosing to live. For the last three months of her life she pretty much stayed at the hospital enduring more and more physical pain. Things like getting a breathing tube in just to be removed days later after realizing it wasn’t respiratory failure, she was simply having a panic attack.

I showed up to visit her often and talked to her about her life, her choices and asked her what would she do different knowing what she knows now. She regrets not speaking up for herself and give herself permission to have boundaries, pretty standard regret I hear from people facing death. I was sorry to hear she still had resentment in her heart'; I believe is what killed her at the age of 61

My mother never learned English so part of my job again was to translate for the doctors and make medical choices for her. The time came to have the talk; It was time to choose to let go or keep enduring pain. The doctors who kept encouraging her to fight were ready to stop her meds and offered her to be on palliative care. That meant stopping all the meds that were helping her manage her multiple health issues and only give her meds to provide comfort. Somehow I thought I was prepared to translate there was nothing else the doctors could do for her. Having to say this to her face, felt very surreal, this was it. I felt so much for her, she naturally felt the fear of dying and could not agree to stop her meds.

Witnessing her in this state was tough. I felt strong most days, plus I had the opportunity of being there for my mother by receiving support from trusted people caring for my son. I felt the culmination of this chapter coming and I chose to love her.

When you're being strong for others, there's a deep sense of responsibility that envelops you. It's like wearing an invisible armor, crafted from the need to protect, comfort, and uplift those who are struggling. I found a reservoir of strength within myself that perhaps I didn't know existed, and this discovery has somehow increased my own feelings of safety in this world. I am capable and stronger than I knew.

This role also came with its own emotional complexities. Having to set aside my own vulnerabilities, fears, and anxieties to maintain a composed and steadfast front, was a lonely endeavor. It was like standing in the eye of the storm, maintaining calm while chaos swirled around me. However, there was a quiet satisfaction and fulfillment that came from being able to be someone's rock. The gratitude, the trust, and the bond that forms when you are strong for others can be incredibly rewarding. It's a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the power of compassion and resilience. My mother confessed to me that she didn't expect it to be me the one who showed up for her, somehow validating my feelings for her unintentional neglect.

During her hospital stay, I witnessed some friends and family who visited her and didn’t know exactly what to say so they just tried to give her hope and some even questioned her decision to continue to endure. I noticed my mother putting effort into being pleasant but deep down feeling gaslighted by the hope and disoriented by the lack of touch. But it wasn’t all bad, some people showed up and went down memory lane with her which was nice to see. In case you’re unaware, when you’re gonna visit someone who’s dying, come prepared to face your feelings about your own mortality so you can truly be present with them. How would you like people to behave if that was you? By observing everything and everyone I now see how meaningful it can be when you’re able to assist and guide people in such life altering situations. I personally gained a new perspective of gratitude for the people working in hospice.

I have one instance I regret and sometimes still saddens me. She asked a few times for a virgin Piña Colada when she was still conscious and eating her favorite foods made her happy. I waited too long to pay attention to that request and the morning I finally showed up with a thermos full of love and Piña Colada, I didn’t find her in her room. I found out she was moved into a different room. As I walked around looking for her I saw a butterfly in one of the rooms and my heart sunk. I knew it was her room. She was officially transitioning and pressured into accepting the palliative care, more organs were failing and she was facing even more pain. This is the choice she avoided making herself but this time I felt confident making for her, she was prolonging her suffering, so I signed the documents. She was awake to take two sips of her drink, probably to show her gratitude and she quickly went to sleep. It was pretty obvious she no longer had the desire to eat.

My hope is to reinforce why people say “it’s the little things that make the difference”. The sheer simplicity of the act magnifies the level of disregard for the impact our actions have on others' emotions. I could not save my mother from herself, understandably so, but I could have made her genuinely smile by making her drink even one day before. Shortly after I signed for the palliative care, came the morphine. She didn’t wake up anymore and passed away the next day, one hour after we decided, as a family, to let her rest by turning off her oxygen. The morphine helped her transition peacefully just like she wanted on February 12, 2023.

This was a transformative journey in my life and I am happy to report my lemonade turned out sweet, not sour. It is true that when it comes to love, I have only regretted giving too little but never too much.