Love Does Not Die - People Do

     By morning the rain had subsided to a gloomy drizzle, matching my mood and head throbbing.  Relentlessly, I crawled out of bed.  I dressed and stood staring out the back window and into the woods.  My mind turned to the day before and the shock now irrating, with the wave of anger, I had felt hours before.  Mother was worse.     Back to the hospital, a ritual by now and a driving force so strong it couldn't keep me away.  It was the longest and coldest March of my life.  My anger and resentment faded into remorse as I watched my mother move from day to day more like a child.  She was hooked up to tubes and beeping machines, IV fluids pumped into her body.  Her face was white and her skin sunken.

I dreaded the Respiratory Therapist’s visit to mother’s room.  I watched as she washed her hands with antiseptic and put on protective gloves.  She used saline solution to loosen the secretions in mother’s permanent tracheotomy.  The horrible sound of the suctioning machine.  The sucking and pumping was needed so mother could breathe easier.  Sometimes the suctioning would take her breath away or the therapists would suction longer than mother could hold her breath.  I felt her pain.  It was awful

As I was leaving the hospital that day, I knew mother would never do the same.  She would soon be in that unconscious world calling her in and out of this life.

Growing tension exploded in other areas.  I was like a fast-burning fuse, ready to explode!  Finding myself increasingly short with my family, doctors, and nurses, jumping all over them for trivial oversights and errors.  Some errors weren't so trivial.  At worst, I became so short, that at times mother apologized for me. 

I decided it was time to take a walk.  I weaved my way down the hall into the older part of the hospital.  There, in one small back corner, was a waiting room.  The furniture reminded me of an eclectic attic.  Tables with collections of literature.  Some undisturbed.  My mind wanted my arms to thrust across the table and toss it all onto the floor.  Just like Jesus did with the money table in the temple. It would have been okay, it was bona fide anger

The chattering in the halls suggested the shift was changing and the day nurses were leaving.  I walked back to mother’s room and glanced out the cold window pane and watched the trailing sunset.  The endless hours of waiting and watching.  The hot cups of coffee steaming from Styrofoam cups was one familiar, creature comfort.  Some part of me had to decide then that she would not be coherent again.

The breathing started early that morning.  My devoted sisters, Renae and Pam, each  at mother's side, embracing her tight.  My sister, Dottie, was there in loving spirit.

Mother was drugged with morphine shots and morphine patches.  She didn't seem to know me anymore.  Her eye movement was fixed, her million-dollar smile, her warm touch, and her beautiful soul were all hidden beneath the drugs.  I called our immediate