Grief Timeline: Mom's Death

Although I wouldn't have wanted her to go any other way, and certainly not alone,  the hardest part was when I held my mother's head, stroking her now-silky grey hair, singing to a song that tinkled out of a cheap music box, while she breathed her last labored breaths. Just minutes before, the nurses had asked me (I had durable POA) whether or not to take "heroic measures." I knew what this meant; they could probably bring her back, but she'd also go back on the vent. Those messages she'd scrawled on the etch-a-sketch my brother bought when she was hooked up to one of those horrid things before that said, "I love to talk--this is killing me" and, later, "Help me die"--how could I forget them, especially now that the doctors had told me the cancer had spread everywhere, and there was no hope? With my heart beating wildly, trying to convince my brain to give them an order that might keep her with us another hour, another week, I instead whispered the words you can never take back: "Let her go."

As she lay dying, for the first time in weeks, my mother seemed to look at me, really look and know who I was.  I even thought I saw a faint smile. With nothing left for them to do, the nursing home staff humanely left us alone. A day or two before, when I'd tried to fix up her "new room"  (a glorified hospital bed with a vinyl curtain around it), I'd hung her "Hawaii" travel posters on the one wall she could see, placed a pot of African violets on her tray, and a silly piano-shaped music box that played her favorite song on the bedside table. Before I held her, I wound it up all the way, and in those last moments, as she drifted off to eternity, I sang to her one last time.

"It was fascination, I know

And it might have ended right there, at the start

Just a passing glance, just a brief romance

And I might have gone on my way

Empty hearted"