Maybe the Zen story is right, but I don't feel better about it.
My mother is dying.
It might be any week now, or if we're lucky, a year or two. But it seems to be inevitable. A few years ago, she had one kidney removed because it was cancerous. Well, the cancer came back in the same area and she's been on medication. It seemed to be under control.
In the past two months, she's been in and out of the hospital for various problems with her remaining kidney. It's not cancer, but a host of other problems. She had to be ambulanced back in last Thursday. She has a staph infection (not that bad one from the news), and the kidney seems to randomly shutting down.
She doesn't want anyone but my father to see her at this point, she's pretty bad looking, I'm told. My sister and I are respecting her wishes, but we still want to see her soon. A lot of this current string of problems stemmed from my mother stopping taking her meds. It started with her anti-depressants, which caused her to emotionally spiral downward. I talked to the visiting nurse, who told me she sees this all the time. My mother was just sick of being sick. I understand. In those moments, going off meds makes perfect sense in your head.
Mom is pretty depressed even on the stuff. She feels like she's losing her dignity and letting everyone down. This current crisis seems to have put a little zap in her system, and maybe she'll let us do more to help. Her whole life has been based in "I'm okay, I don't need help". This attitude has definitely been passed on to her children.
My sister is maintaining a stoic front. Maybe it's real, I don't know. She's always been very fact-based. To her, mom isn't dying until a) she does, or b) a doctor says it's happening. We're keeping the grandkids on a need to know basis. Just that grandma is sick and being taken care of.
And me? Not sure. It's hard to conceive of life without either of my parents. But there's a part of me that knows it's really out of my hands. What's going to happen is going to happen. All I can really do is let her know she is loved and I'll be with her as long as she needs.
So... yeah.