Dream A Little Dream Of Me.
I think I may be dealing with a minor form of post traumatic stress following my mothers death and the experience at the hospital we had with her.
Wednesday night I had intense flashbacks, meaning it was pretty much like I was right there, of seeing her dead in the hospital room and seeing her in her coffin at the funeral. I cannot begin to describe the feeling of horror that took over.
And then there are the nightmares I get, in them the setting is always different, but the main issue/outcome are always the same.
In the dreams my mother is very sick and we are told she is going to die, so we gather around and spend her final moments with her.
Just when we think she has died, she wakes up and she is ok.
But then something happens and she dies in the end. Always.
I was thinking about the dreams today, and I'm no psychiatrist, but I'm pretty sure that the dreams are caused by the experience we had at the hospital, which was this:
After being on life support for 48 hours she was taken off of it, the doctor told us she would die within 10 to 15 minutes of being off the ventilator, but she lived for 13 hours.
The next morning someone came to talk to us about putting my mother in a nursing home situation with hospice and we agreed. We had some hope that maybe she would make it.
5 minutes after my father left to sign the paperwork she died while my sister and I were saying goodbye.
So I guess I just keep reliving that moment.
I think part of me feels guilty, because I feel like I let her go.
Seconds before she died I leaned over her and said "it's ok to let go, I love you, goodbye" and I think that she heard me and listened to me.
And that was it.
There is this part of me that feels like she didnt have to die. She could have been saved. But my sister and my father didnt call an ambulance until her brain was more than 50% covered in blood.
I know deep down its not entirely their fault, she insisted she did not want to go to the hospital.
And they couldn't have known what was going on inside her skull.
And then another part of me feels like maybe if we left her on life support long enough she would still be alive, but what kind of life would she be living right now?
The rational part of me that understand the events that happened and the irrational part of me that screams "it didn't have to be this way!!!" Are constantly at war.
But today, I found a little bit of peace, I thought back to how bad I feel that I didn't speak to my mother on the phone that day, but I don't feel that bad because we saw each other the night before and had a wonderful dinner with her family.
I was trying to remember the last words she said to me that night and I'm pretty sure they were "Love you, solong."
Which is kind of perfect.
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