I had one of those nights.. I was trying to organize the events of my mother's death in my head, so I started asking my dad questions. We ended up talking about it a lot, and why she crashed so quickly.. and he said that he told me that she wasn't going to last very long and that I should see her once more before she died. He said that he remembered that I wasn't in the room very long, but that he also didn't blame me considering her state.
I felt the need to defend myself, because I felt that it seemed really selfish that I couldn't bare to be in the room with my dying mother.
Going in there, I was initially just horrified at how she looked.. she was so weak, frail, and small. I can't remember exactly, but I remember her body was sort of taught and pulled in on itself, and her breathing was ragged and through an oxygen mask. I think, when I talked to her, her eyes were open. I think she was just opening and closing them.. I don't think she was capable of keeping her eyes open very long. The expression.. it was a look of desperation, of being lost, of being somewhere very far away. I stood next to her and I told her that I would be okay, to not worry about me. She had expressed fears so many times that my Dad would be mean to me and I wouldn't be able to defend myself and she wouldn't be there to defend me. I told her that Mark would take care of me (cause I was dating Mark at the time and that was while we were actually close) and that Dad would take care of me and not to worry, that I could handle myself. I told her that I loved her, and then I left.
It was all I could take.. I hated seeing her like that.
My dad said that he brought her doctor in there, Dr. Khan, because the hospital doctor wouldn't tell him anything. Dr. Khan told him that keeping her on morphine, though it would kill her, was the only humane thing to do, because the cancer had spread so much.. Dr. Khan is a nationally famous oncologist, he goes all around the country to give lectures on cancer treatment, and has seen many MANY patients, and therefor seen many die. But my dad said that when he looked at my mother, then looked at him, Dr. Khan had tears streaming down his face.
He treated my mother for 16 years, he always said that she fought more than any other person he had ever treated. He said that she took the chemo better than any other patient as well.. They said that with the kind of vicious cancer she had, she had a 60% chance of surviving 5 years.. and she lived 16. She was a fighter, and it was so incredibly hard to see her finally lose.
I know that I have her fight in me.. but what good did it do her? In the end it just prolonged her suffering.. and she died anyways.
I dunno.. I just cried a lot.
I also thought about my brother, and the was he looked in his coffin. He was so.. stiff, cold, sunken. My brother who had always been a smart ass, been intelligent, been both my tormentor and protector.. and he was just laying there, dead.
I've lost so many people.. and I miss them all so much.