It's Been a Heck of a Year
Oct. 7th, 2024 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
przedI haven't posted here in forever, and though a lot of you who follow me probably know why, I feel like I need to actually post the words before I can think of posting, or writing anything else.
So, my mom died. In the beginning of May. After a very sudden, very catastrophic illness.
My mom was 94, living independently in the same house I grew up in, and was generally acknowledged to be a tough cookie. She'd had three surgeries in the past year, and bounced back from all of them astoundingly well. (The last one was to clear out her carotid artery after she had a mild stroke, and the surgeon said he wouldn't normally operate on a 94-year-old, but for the fact that my mom was in pretty good health. Apart from the mild stroke thing.)
But then she went from perfectly fine one day, to unable to get out of bed and not quite lucid the next. It took the hospital four days to figure out she had pneumonia. (She had no fever, no cough, no indication that there was pneumonia but the fact that she could barely move and drifted in and out of lucidity. I made a point of explaining to every new nurse and doctor we saw that two days, three days, five days ago, my mom had been living perfectly happily on her own.)
They started her on medication, but she wasn't responding to it and she very vocally told me, in her more lucid moments, that she was done. My dad died 16 years ago. Most of her friends are dead. She was ready. I listened to her. I got the on call doctor to listen to her. We all agreed to start the process for mom to have a medically assisted death. (Legal in Canada.) I wish I could say that happened as my mom wished, but in spite of everyone at the hospital being on board, the bureaucratic and legal wheels turned too slowly, and by the time we got approval, mom was no longer lucid enough to give her consent.
Fortunately, I work for an organization that was fine with me dropping everything and taking caregiver leave, so I was able to be with mom for her last three weeks in hospital, right until the end. It was hard, but I'm glad I could be there for her, and I had the support of friends, family and the neighbours who'd been keeping a look out for mom for years. We were also lucky that the hospital - a small hospital in a small Northern Ontario town - has a really top-notch palliative unit. The staff there helped mom stay as comfortable as possible and provided a comforting place for me and the family.
Since mom passed, I've been swamped with the paperwork that happens after someone dies. I'm an only child and my mom's executor, so I had to make all the phone calls and fill out all the forms. And I had to sell the family house. I didn't intend to sell it so soon, but the realtor who gave me the evaluation on it for probate told me she could see it in a week, and she did. (There is a terrible lack of affordable housing in my old home town, and since I didn't need to wring every damn dollar out of the house I told the realtor I wanted it to go to someone local who was going to live in it, for list price with no bidding wars. It went to a young local guy who'd been trying to find a house for a year and is part of the volunteer fire brigade.) We asked for a September closing date, but that still meant every weekend of the summer I was up north sorting through all the physical stuff from my parents' lives and mine. I gave away furniture and dishes; I found the coin collection my mom had lost track of and always worried about and my daughter wants to keep; I decided what art to sell/give away and what would go well in our house.
The sale of the house closed a month ago. A lot of paperwork is done, but more has yet to be done. I have boxes books and letters and family history that I need to decide what to do with.
Outside of work, I haven't written a damn word since mom got sick. But the ebbs and flows of grief are starting to ease, and Yuletide is coming, and I'm going to be optimistic and hope I can write at least a thousand words in some randomly assigned fandom. And maybe I'll write some film reviews from TIFF.
So, my mom died. In the beginning of May. After a very sudden, very catastrophic illness.
My mom was 94, living independently in the same house I grew up in, and was generally acknowledged to be a tough cookie. She'd had three surgeries in the past year, and bounced back from all of them astoundingly well. (The last one was to clear out her carotid artery after she had a mild stroke, and the surgeon said he wouldn't normally operate on a 94-year-old, but for the fact that my mom was in pretty good health. Apart from the mild stroke thing.)
But then she went from perfectly fine one day, to unable to get out of bed and not quite lucid the next. It took the hospital four days to figure out she had pneumonia. (She had no fever, no cough, no indication that there was pneumonia but the fact that she could barely move and drifted in and out of lucidity. I made a point of explaining to every new nurse and doctor we saw that two days, three days, five days ago, my mom had been living perfectly happily on her own.)
They started her on medication, but she wasn't responding to it and she very vocally told me, in her more lucid moments, that she was done. My dad died 16 years ago. Most of her friends are dead. She was ready. I listened to her. I got the on call doctor to listen to her. We all agreed to start the process for mom to have a medically assisted death. (Legal in Canada.) I wish I could say that happened as my mom wished, but in spite of everyone at the hospital being on board, the bureaucratic and legal wheels turned too slowly, and by the time we got approval, mom was no longer lucid enough to give her consent.
Fortunately, I work for an organization that was fine with me dropping everything and taking caregiver leave, so I was able to be with mom for her last three weeks in hospital, right until the end. It was hard, but I'm glad I could be there for her, and I had the support of friends, family and the neighbours who'd been keeping a look out for mom for years. We were also lucky that the hospital - a small hospital in a small Northern Ontario town - has a really top-notch palliative unit. The staff there helped mom stay as comfortable as possible and provided a comforting place for me and the family.
Since mom passed, I've been swamped with the paperwork that happens after someone dies. I'm an only child and my mom's executor, so I had to make all the phone calls and fill out all the forms. And I had to sell the family house. I didn't intend to sell it so soon, but the realtor who gave me the evaluation on it for probate told me she could see it in a week, and she did. (There is a terrible lack of affordable housing in my old home town, and since I didn't need to wring every damn dollar out of the house I told the realtor I wanted it to go to someone local who was going to live in it, for list price with no bidding wars. It went to a young local guy who'd been trying to find a house for a year and is part of the volunteer fire brigade.) We asked for a September closing date, but that still meant every weekend of the summer I was up north sorting through all the physical stuff from my parents' lives and mine. I gave away furniture and dishes; I found the coin collection my mom had lost track of and always worried about and my daughter wants to keep; I decided what art to sell/give away and what would go well in our house.
The sale of the house closed a month ago. A lot of paperwork is done, but more has yet to be done. I have boxes books and letters and family history that I need to decide what to do with.
Outside of work, I haven't written a damn word since mom got sick. But the ebbs and flows of grief are starting to ease, and Yuletide is coming, and I'm going to be optimistic and hope I can write at least a thousand words in some randomly assigned fandom. And maybe I'll write some film reviews from TIFF.
