I Held Her Hand

Mom died in a bare room, across the hall from the nursing home dining room, and away from the other residents.  There was a bed, a wardrobe, a nightstand, and a chair.

After years of  caregiving we were nearing the end. The past few months had been filled with frustration, fear and anger.  After so much sadness, confusion, pain and helplessness, she was still.  

She held on longer than expected and I spent three days and nights in that room with her, flattening the chair into a bed and rolling it next to her when I needed to sleep.  I held her hand.  I told her I was sorry.  I told her it was OK. Of course it wasn’t.  

There were some hard moments in that room.  Although she was unconscious the majority of the time, there were times when it seemed she could hear us or when she seemed to be responding.  There were a couple of times when she seemed to be suffering and there was the moment when we knew it was time to start the morphine.

It was a time of transition for both of us.  She was in the process of leaving and I was in the process of staying.  Time stood still.  For just a bit we sat at the intersection of life and death. There was nothing else happening in either of our worlds. I held her hand.

November 2014

 November 2014

I drove south on I-35, crossing the state line from Minnesota into Iowa.  It had snowed and everywhere it was bright and flat and white.

My mother, a few months out from being diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment, dozed in the passenger seat.  

We had flown to Minnesota a few days earlier for my cousin’s funeral.   Now we were on our way to Audubon, IA to visit mom’s last living aunt.  

As a child I had made the trip from Minnesota to Iowa many times.  Large family reunions or funerals for relatives I didn’t know.  I most often found myself in a corner, listening to the adults catch up and reminisce.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, that trip in November 2014 was the beginning of the end.  A quiet prelude before the MCI diagnosis, the decline into dementia.  The tension and friction of taking over more and more of her life.  The bills, the car, the house.  Moving her, against her will, to an independent living facility. 

All that was ahead of me.  For now I drove.  I relished the moments when she slept.  I took in the plains, the farmland, the quiet.  I recalled the feeling of being huddled in the back seat, mom and grandma talking and talking as they drove south. I can still see the gentle roll of the hills.  See them stretched before me, three or four rising ahead of us as we dipped and rose, dipped and rose.