Most of this post was written on Tuesday, four days ago.

Yesterday, it seemed everything was changing. At a little before 9a.m., I got a text from my mother’s friend Peggy. It was the most frightening communication I’ve ever received:

Hi Cameron. Hospice nurse is going to call you. Please come down today. I believe she is getting very close and she can’t be left alone at night.

I left her a message asking if she was saying what I thought she was saying. I was already dressed for yoga.  I wondered what to do. I thought about how the yoga mat is a microcosm of the world, and that the balance and groundedness we find on the mat can be brought with us into the rest of the world. I thought about people telling me, as a caregiver, to take care of myself. So I went. But for the first ten minutes I just wanted to leave. I was having a hard time not crying. I kept wiping my eyes so as not to draw attention to myself. I stuck it out, but left quickly after the class, without talking to anyone. I knew a single word or look could set me off.

Back from yoga, I saw a voicemail from Peggy. “Oh, God,” I said. I felt a little wobbly. I pressed play to listen to the message. “When I mean she’s getting close,” Peggy said in her message, “I mean very close.” Peggy had just watched her ex-husband die, rather suddenly, of a fast-spreading cancer. And Mom had vomited forcefully all night.  She was unable to eat or even to drink.  She was too weak to walk or even to stand up safely.

I began to sob. No! I’m not ready!

You’re never ready.

It’s just too fast. 

I began to move about my Telluride apartment quickly, throwing things into the duffel bag and laptop backpack I usually take to Montrose. I said goodbye to Danny, my new housemate. On the drive I cried. I drove sobbing, and at times with a keening wail, a wail as long as my outbreath and higher in pitch than anything I’ve heard come out of my body before. 

When I came in through Mom’s kitchen door, Berle and Peggy and Monika were there.

“Superman is here!” Peggy said.

“Your mom keeps asking for you,” Berle said.

They gathered around me and hugged me. Mom called out to me.

I went to Mom, looking spent on her couch, and kissed the top of her head. I cradled her beautiful head. “I don’t want to go, she said,” in a near whisper. “I just want a little longer.”

“I know,” I said. “You are the light of my life.”

I leaned down onto the couch and hugged her for a long time. After a while I went back into the kitchen to fetch my laptop. I needed to cancel all my coaching appointments for the day, and for Tuesday as well. I sat down on one of the small white chairs in the kitchen, opened my laptop, and began to cry quietly. The women gathered around me and hugged me. “You won’t be alone, Cameron,” Peggy said firmly. “We’ll be here with you.”

A few weeks ago, my mother said she was concerned about leaving me alone because of, she said, “your abandonment issues”.

“I’ll be okay, Mom,” I said, because that is the correct thing to say. “Don’t suffer more because you’re worried about me.”

“I know,” she’d said. “I just want to continue to be able to help you, to cook food for you and do things for you.”

On the other couch, which stood parallel to Mom’s, I sat next to Bonnie, whom my mother has known since they both worked at the local courthouse in the early 1990s. I said to her, sotto voce, “I was really scared this morning when Peggy said Mom may be near the end.”  Perhaps I hoped that she would amend Peggy’s dire fears.

Bonnie, who had also recently seen death from cancer up close, looked at me with compassion. “She may be,” she said.  “We just don’t know.”

I noticed I was now barely giving a thought to the stress that had plagued me for several days prior, that of my landlord threatening to evict my housemate and I unless we signed a lease less favorable than the one we’d just signed a few days earlier, and insisting on bogus grounds that we didn’t already have a binding contract. And being pretty dickish about the whole thing. There was little room for that concern anymore. I was beside myself with the admixture of fear and sadness we feel whenever we must contemplate letting go.

My sister-in-law, Jannilyn, arrived from Grand Junction. She came with her mother, Linda, who soon put her massage skills to work on Mom’s left foot (Silke had the right). Carrie’s mother, my second cousin Laurel, had insisted on driving her, because, Laurel said, Carrie was “a mess” and couldn’t drive herself. Mom’s young friend Gregory, whom she has helped to raise since his birth, came with his father, Paul, and sat on the couch at Mom’s feet. Gregory’s older sister Annika entered and went straight for her mother’s knee. She didn’t go to Mom until she was leaving, but I did see that her eyes had filled up. Gregory saw my tear-filled eyes at one point, and the next time I looked up at him, his eyes were red too.

Linda, who is Filipino, presented my mother with a beautiful purple scarf and a stunning red wool coat that had been too long for her.Mom put the scarf on, a swirly purple contrasting with her light-blue pajamas. On my phone I looked up the poem “When I Grow Old I Shall Wear Purple,” with its stirring opening lines “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.” I read it aloud and Mom smiled. I wondered if she would ever wear that red coat.

On a few occasions, as she lay on her couch by the window, Mom spoke to the assembled American visitors in German. Something about her sister, her father, and a letter. She said other, unclear things. She was heavily medicated with her IV painkiller and Ativan, a powerful anti-anxiety drug and relaxant that would supposedly help her to feel less nauseated, and to vomit less.

In the late afternoon my friend Laurel drove from Telluride bearing red curry and wine and hand-crafted sodas, as well as her own sleeping bag. She went to the store and bought groceries and night-lights. She doled out red curry and rice.  Later, she helped the four of us put Mom to bed, which is a logistical operation involving four pillows, the microwaveable Teddy bear, several forms of marijuana, smartwater, the IV unit, and a small orange bowl of Ativan tablets I’d cut in two. Mom was too weak to get up – unlike earlier in the day, when we’d led her to the bathroom and she’d come back draped on my back and shuffling behind. So I leaned down, cradled her legs in one arm and upper body in the other, and picked her up. As I turned toward the bedroom, she lay her head against my chest. I heard someone, maybe Berle, say Awww. I carried her to her bed and gently laid her down in it. I kissed her face and temples, called her sweetheart.

“She has been so much calmer since you got here,” Peggy said.  “You really calm her down.”

 

“It’s just surreal,” I said to Laurel. We had been watching the mostly mindless TV series “Arrow” almost non-stop from 8:30 to 12:30 and for a moment I wasn’t feeling awful. I knew it wouldn’t last. Morning would come and the mood would return.

11:47p.m. I am troubled that Mom, groggy and often sleeping from the medication, isn’t able to be fully present. It’s harder for her to follow conversations, and certainly difficult for her to express her deepest thoughts, much less her former, larger-than-life personality. One casualty has been those who would communicate by phone. She feels too little energy to have a conversation – most of her speaking is done in sentence fragments – which is too bad for my sister, Candy, my niece, Brianna, and my former wife, Mieshelle, who still says she feels connected to, and tells everyone she meets about, my mother. I don’t want Mom to hurt, or feel nausea, but I do miss her. Will it always be thus, until the end?

I feel a great wave of sadness come over me. I am missing her already.

12:35a.m. Laurel and I had just turned in for the night, Laurel on the green couch in the living room, with her sleeping bag, when I heard a loud thump and my mother’s cries. 

“Cameron, your mother!” Laurel cried. I had already sprung out of bed and sprinted out my bedroom door, running into the bathroom where I saw my mother lying face down on the floor like a police outline. Her pajamas were down to her knees. I reached under her arms and picked her up in an instant. If she’d weighed 300 pounds I’d have still lifted her up like that.

She was sobbing, a bit groggily, and not speaking, so that she sounded eerily like a hurt and confused child. She’d hit her head falling. Laurel helped me to seat my mother on the toilet. I caressed her head, told her to call me whenever she needed to use the bathroom. Having calmed her down, Laurel and I exited. Only a nightlight was on in the bathroom, so I peaked through the crack in the door to make sure she was okay. She was hanging her head, as if asleep.

She was up in the middle of the night. She walked on her own power to the kitchen and made coffee. Laurel awoke and got up with her, and later reported, “She was totally herself.  She was walking around, didn’t need any help, and she was bossy.” She laughed. “She said to me, ‘This is my quiet time, so you can go back to sleep now.’” Laurel laughed again at the memory.

Women my mother has never met are writing in, their love filling up various Facebook pages.

In the morning, I awoke to a message from my good friend Adam, whom I’d known since the first days of law school, in 1989. Without any ado at all, he informed me he would be arriving in Montrose at 8:23p.m. on Tuesday night, and on Facebook he said he would be staying in Colorado “indefinitely”. I felt immediately relieved, and very grateful.